In Alice Lowe’s feature debut as writer/director, the premise is simple: a pregnant woman is convinced her unborn foetus is compelling her to kill the people she holds responsible for the death of her partner. Angry and upset at being alone, Ruth (Lowe) targets each individual – inappropriate pet shop owner Mr Zabek (Skinner), repulsive Seventies DJ Dan (Davis), lonely corporate lawyer Ella (Dickie), anonymous victim Zac (Meeten), apologetic rock climbing guide Tom (Novak), fitness fanatic Len (Whelan) – at the behest of her unborn child, and in the process finds being a mother-to-be more daunting (obviously) than she’d ever expected.

Made over a two week period while Lowe was actually pregnant, Prevenge is a movie that covers a lot of ground in its relatively short running time, and which isn’t just a standard revenge thriller tricked out with gory set pieces. It’s also a pitch black comedy, an uncompromising examination of an emotionally disturbed pregnant woman, and a mordaunt exercise in extreme pre-natal depression. Lowe has created a complex, flawed-yet-undeniably decent anti-heroine whose particular psychosis is both alarming and understandable at the same time. She has conversations with her unborn child that push the envelope of maternal paranoia. While most expectant mothers will worry that there might be something wrong with their baby, it’s safe to assume that they won’t be worried about the foetus talking to them and advocating a string of murders.

Throughout, Ruth is worried that her baby might not be normal. She misses a scan just in case it reveals something abnormal, an issue that Ruth’s midwife (Hartley) dismisses with the practised ease of someone who’s heard it all before. But of course, Ruth knows better. Cajoled and persuaded by the baby growing inside her to become a serial killer, Ruth knows that her baby is abnormal; she just doesn’t want anyone to know how much. When the midwife makes mention of letting Social Services know that Ruth is struggling with the pregnancy, Ruth is adamant that she doesn’t want them involved, that she doesn’t want her baby taken away from her. Despite her mixed feelings, Ruth’s maternal instinct to protect her offspring is as deep-rooted and profound as any other mother’s.

Lowe makes Ruth’s ambivalence a credible reaction to the idea that she’s being urged to revenge by a foetus, a “belief” that is clearly the result of a mental break that Ruth has experienced in the wake of her partner’s death. Lowe is also clever enough to avoid trying to introduce any notion of ambiguity to this fractured relationship – Ruth is mentally ill, and though is a movie with very definite horror overtones, any potential supernatural reason for the foetus’ speaking to her is never allowed any credence. Ruth is maddened by grief, then, and it’s this reason that provides her with both a defined character arc, and the necessary sympathy to help audiences identify with her.

In terms of Ruth’s victims, Lowe is also clever enough to make it a game of two halves. Mr Zabek, DJ Dan, and Ella are all horrible people in their own right. Mr Zabek is the slimy high priest of sexual innuendo, while DJ Dan is so crass and boorish that he can throw up into his Seventies afro wig and then think nothing of kissing Ruth full on the lips. Ella is unfeeling, dismissive of others, and generally insensitive. Each of them are so awful that when Ruth kills them the temptation is to cheer, and urge her on to the next victim. But when she arrives at Zac’s home – and makes Ruth the cuckoo in the nest, a neat twist on her own situation – Lowe finds that Zac’s flatmate, Josh (Wozniak), is a genuinely nice man, something she wasn’t expecting. His subsequent demise doesn’t sit well with Ruth, despite her baby’s withering disregard for both him and Ruth’s feelings.

From there on, Ruth’s commitment to avenging her partner’s death begins to falter. Her first contact with Tom (prior to despatching Zac) didn’t go the way she’d planned, and her next attempt fails also, so she moves on to Len, who puts up a fight (complete with boxing gloves). Her midwife, realising something is wrong, admonishes Ruth and tells her it’s got to stop. Returning to Tom again, Ruth finds his partner is expecting a child also, and her maternal instinct kicks in for this other mother-to-be: how fair would it be for Tom’s partner to be in the same situation as Ruth? The foetus is unconcerned, but before Ruth can go through with anything, her waters break and her whole world changes. Some viewers may think that this “second half” isn’t as effective as the gore and humour-soaked “first half”, but Lowe isn’t interested in simply repeating the early formula, and instead adds layers to both Ruth’s predicament and the movie’s overall sense of bitter regret.

But this is a comedy as well as a sustained and impressive look at pre-natal paranoia and psychosis. Lowe is an accomplished writer of naturalistic dialogue, but she’s also a winner when it comes to pithy one-liners (of anchovies: “They look like the eyelids of old men that have died”), and isn’t afraid to include some really bad puns, such as, “It’s a cutthroat world, you know”, after slitting Ella’s throat. There’s the aforementioned sexual innuendo of Mr Zabek (which often settles for the single entendre), and some of DJ Dan’s observations (“You’re not Olivia Newton-John. You’re more like Elton John”) are so cruelly insulting that you can’t help laughing at them, even though you shouldn’t. And Ruth herself, in her disjointed, socially awkward way, says things that only she could (mostly) get away with. It’s through the dialogue that Lowe builds her characters, fleshing them out and giving the cast much more to work with than it seems at first.

When it comes to the gore, the movie doesn’t hold back, with each death played out in the style of an Eighties British horror, and there’s a mundanity to each one that adds to the overall effectiveness (Ruth’s weapon of choice is a carving knife). Again, Lowe isn’t afraid to show how awful each murder is, nor how it affects Ruth the longer she continues. In the lead role, Lowe gives a terrific performance, one that’s brimming with quiet verve and sincerity, and is thoughtful and brave. When she applies make up for Halloween and takes to the streets, it’s easy to see just how disturbed she is thanks to the design she’s created (even though you can see it just as well by the look in Ruth’s eyes). Ruth is a wonderful creation, and Lowe does her justice, never striking a false note, and staying true to the character throughout. The movie could almost be a one-woman show, were it not for a battery of equally commendable performances from the likes of Hartley and Dickie, and if the men – for the most part – come off as douchebags and unreliable pricks, then it’s a small price to pay when a movie is this good and this rewarding.

Rating: 8/10 – a movie about a damaged soul that comes complete with plenty of heart and soul amidst all the carnage, Prevenge is uncompromising, poignant and hilarious, and a major feather in Lowe’s cap; marred only by some poor lighting choices made on too many occasions, and a final scene that goes against everything that’s gone before, it’s a movie that’s full of surprises and confidently assembled by its very talented writer/director/star.

If you’ve never heard of Maxwell Perkins (Firth) – and it’s very likely that you haven’t – then Genius, the debut feature by Michael Grandage, won’t actually tell you very much about him. You will discover that he was an editor at Charles Scribner’s & Sons during the Twenties and Thirties, and that he helped shape the writing careers of both F. Scott Fitzgerald (Pearce) and Ernest Hemingway (West). You’ll also learn that he had a wife, Louise (Linney), five daughters, and – apparently – never took off his hat, even at home. But these are just facts about the man. What made him tick, so to speak, what made him so passionate about books and writers, well, that’s another matter. And it’s one the movie, despite being based on A. Scott Berg’s National Book Award-winner Max Perkins: Editor of Genius (1978) and adapted by John Logan, fails to address.

Instead, the movie focuses on Thomas Wolfe (Law), an aspiring novelist whose first work of full-length fiction has been turned down by every other publishing house in New York except for Scribner’s. The novel, O Lost, is long, unwieldy, and overly descriptive in a grand romantic manner, but Perkins believes sincerely that it should be published, though with a fair bit of judicious pruning. Wolfe can’t believe his good luck, and agrees to working with Perkins to wrestle the novel into a more publishable form. Long months pass, and in 1929, Wolfe’s first novel is published to great acclaim with a new title, Look Homeward, Angel.

The two men are polar opposites. Perkins is quiet to the point of apparent catatonia, while Wolfe is brash, loud, and unapologetically hedonistic. He also writes like a man possessed, producing hundreds of pages of prose almost every day, but with no idea of how to corral that prose into a consistent format, or how to self-edit. Hence his need for Perkins to work with him. Wolfe’s success is compounded by his second novel (initially even more long, unwieldy and overly descriptive in a grand romantic manner), Of Time and the River, being just as well-regarded and received as his first. But now, jealousy and paranoia begin to take hold of Wolfe, and the idea that his books are only successful because of Perkins’ involvement, starts to nag at the author, and he takes steps to distance himself from Perkins and claim all the credit. This leads to an estrangement between the two men, as well as Wolfe signing with another publisher.

Genius moves at an agonisingly slow pace for the majority of its running time, and there are no end of scenes where Perkins sits reading manuscripts with nothing else happening within the frame. His is an interior, contemplative existence, allied to a contained, watchful existence that allows for few displays of honest emotion (when he raises his voice in anger to Louise at one point, it’s like a verbal slap across the face, such is the shock of it). Perkins may live most of his life through the pages of the books he edits, and he may be deliberately reclusive in terms of having a social life, but his skills as an editor can’t be challenged. The movie makes this point quite cleverly and quite succinctly, during a sequence where Perkins’ skill as an editor is given the spotlight. At first he reads out a passage Wolfe has written about the central character in O Lost falling in love at first sight. It’s overlong, and Perkins is unconvinced by much of Wolfe’s prose. And so he challenges Wolfe’s assertions at every turn, and soon the passage has been whittled down to a single, concise paragraph. And it’s so much better.

It’s also one of the very few occasions where the movie attempts to speed up or show a sense of urgency, but this is down to the editing of the sequence – step forward, Chris Dickens – rather than anything that Logan’s script or Grandage’s direction does. The slow, measured pace of the movie is its biggest obstacle to being liked, though the way in which Wolfe is introduced to the audience doesn’t help either. Where Firth underplays Perkins to silent perfection, Law is a bundle of energy as Wolfe, but in a way that soon proves wearing. He’s overly voluble, lacks filters, and is unconcerned if he upsets the people around him, a trait that become more and more entrenched the more successful he becomes. By the time Law has theatrically made his way through his third or fourth literary-style monologue, it’s clear that the template for the character has been set. Law is good as Wolfe, but his performance is one that Grandage doesn’t seem able to rein in when needed, and as a result, Law seems more in control of his performance than his director is.

While Linney is consigned to the background as Perkins’ demure, supportive wife, Kidman is given the more dramatic role of Wolfe’s lover, Aline Bernstein. Aline supported Wolfe when he was trying to get O Lost published, but as he found fame and fortune, their relationship became more and more adversarial, thanks largely to Aline’s feelings of betrayal and abandonment. Wolfe became dismissive of her feelings, and the disintegration of their relationship adds some much needed meat to the bones of Logan’s script. Kidman is caustic yet vulnerable as Aline, and it’s a shot in the arm for viewers who may have been thinking that the actress’s best work is behind her.

Despite the performances (Pearce is also on good form as a struggling Fitzgerald), the movie appears deliberately gloomy thanks to an almost monochrome colour scheme that’s been lit in equally dreary fashion by DoP Ben Davis. This makes the movie seem drier and even more constrained than it actually is, and again, Grandage doesn’t have any answers to combat this. Maybe it was a deliberate choice, and the movie is certainly consistent enough for this to be the case, but by making the movie look so unappealing and drab it has a knock-on effect on the material as a whole. It’s one of those occasions where you wonder if anyone was watching the dailies that closely.

In the end, the movie is less about Perkins and his talent as an editor, and it’s even less concerned with his legacy (trotting out scenes with Fitzgerald and Hemingway appears to be an attempt to do this, but these scenes are more about them than Perkins). The focus is on Wolfe and his need to write to the exclusion of all else that doesn’t further his writing. A scene midway through has Wolfe take Perkins to a jazz club. There the differences between the two men are highlighted, but in such a way that Perkins is left adrift as the scene concentrates on Wolfe. What Grandage and Logan have forgotten, it seems, is that Perkins is their main character, and not Wolfe, and this in turn makes one wonder: where was someone to shape and polish the script in the same way that Perkins shaped and polished the novels he helped publish? A fair point, maybe, but not one you’re likely to find an answer to.

Rating: 6/10 – good performances all round can’t help Genius avoid being labelled as tedious, tepid, or perfunctory; lacking emotions that might instil reactions from its audience, the movie is a dry, humdrum examination of literary excellence behind the scenes, and a love of the printed word aside, never takes flight in the way that it should do.

Robbie (Scott) is blind. His brother, Bill (Kroll), is not. Robbie is an athlete who regularly takes part in sponsored sporting events such as marathons in order to raise money for charity (and hey, if it gets him a little press or TV attention, that’s okay, isn’t it?). Bill is the manager of a small printing firm who regularly finds himself helping Robbie with his training, and taking part in each sponsored sporting event. Does he want to? Well, yes and no. Bill loves his brother, but deep down he wants to be free to live his own life and not defer so much of it to Robbie. This makes him feel guilty, which in turn pushes him to help his brother, which in turn makes him want to feel free to live his own life, which in turn makes him feel guilty, etc. etc.

It doesn’t help matters that Robbie is a bit of a jerk, one who never credits Bill for the help and support he provides, and who rarely acknowledges that he even needs any help in the first place. Living in Robbie’s shadow for so long – Robbie has been blind ever since a childhood accident – Bill has become aimless, self-deprecating, and bored. So when he meets Rose (Slate) at the wake for her boyfriend (who was knocked down and killed by a bus while having an argument with her), Bill’s emotional guilt over Robbie is matched by Rose’s feelings of guilt over her boyfriend. They find they have lots of things in common, and later on that same evening, they sleep together.

But in the morning, Rose has second thoughts about seeing Bill again, and tells him so. Upset and humiliated, Bill tries to forget about her, but he finds that he can’t. Meanwhile, Robbie announces his latest plan to swim across a local lake, but Bill stands his ground and refuses to take part. Robbie continues with the plan and finds a volunteer willing to help him train, and be in the boat that guides him across the lake. Of course, the volunteer is Rose, and when Bill finds out she’s helping his brother, he begins to take more of an active role in Robbie’s training. This leads to some unexpected complications (unexpected except in romantic comedies such as this one), as Bill realises he’s in love with Rose, Rose develops feelings for Robbie, and after not too long, Robbie takes it for granted that Rose and he are a couple. As the day of the swim approaches, the relationships of all three are tested, and certain revelations muddy the waters enough so that on the day, nothing goes quite as planned.

Early on in My Blind Brother, Bill reveals to Rose how much he doesn’t like Robbie, and that he sometimes wishes him harm. Later, we see him leave open a kitchen cupboard in order for Robbie to walk into it face first. It’s darker moments like these that make the movie a little more interesting than you’d expect given its low-budget indie roots and general indie demeanour. But My Blind Brother does its best not to be so predictable, and even though the outcome can be guessed before you even sit down to watch the movie, there’s still enough there in the run-up to keep audiences involved and amused. This is thanks mostly to Scott’s performance as Robbie, whose narcissistic, self-centred, arrogant tendencies mark him out as a rare creature of little depth or self-awareness. At a restaurant, he criticises another disabled man for being too noisy, and makes no apology for it. The message is clear: his disability is more “important” than anyone else’s.

By making Robbie such a jerk, writer/director Goodhart – here expanding on her original 2003 short of the same name – allows the movie to retain a dramatic sensibility amidst the more standard rom-com tropes. As well, Bill is a bit of a maladjusted schlepp, the antithesis of Robbie’s hard-line positivity, a guy whose one ambition is to spend lots of time watching TV. When he discovers that this is one of Rose’s favourite pastimes, his face lights up with the unexpected joy of finding a kindred spirit. It’s no wonder he falls in love with her: she’s as unhappy as he is. But whereas Bill would be happy to wallow on his couch for the rest of his life, Rose at least wants to do something, even if she’s not sure what that something is. Thus her involvement with Robbie leads Bill to regain some of his self-respect, and shed the ennui that’s been holding him back.

These themes are spread throughout the script, and given equal screen time with the more comedic moments, such as the one pictured above, where Bill and Rose have been interrupted having sex by Robbie, and have to put their clothes back on without him realising what’s going on. Goodhart’s direction is so good in this scene. It’s not just the physical awkwardness of the moment, but the expressions on the faces of both Bill and Rose that makes the scene so funny. They barely have to say a word, and that’s what makes it so effective. Elsewhere there’s plenty of mileage to be made from Robbie’s overwhelming self-belief, whether he’s driving a car, jumping into a swimming pool, or patronising female reporters, and Bill’s perplexed looks when things don’t go his way.

The romantic elements are handled well, and though viewers won’t find anything new on offer, it’s the quality of the performances and the sharpness of Goodhart’s script that makes up for any failings in the material. Scott’s portrayal of Robbie is often harsh and uncompromising; he’s like the pantomime villain everyone wants to boo and hiss. Kroll (the former Bobby Bottleservice) is lovable and sympathetic as Bill, and handles the darker aspects of his character with understated aplomb. Slate, an actress who impresses with each role she takes, and who was especially effective in Obvious Child (2014), brings an off-kilter sincerity to her role that helps define the character and her quirky understanding of personal responsibility. There are good supporting turns too from Kazan as Rose’s roommate, Francie, and Hewson as Bill’s blind, stoner friend, GT, while the script balances the light and shade of Robbie and Bill’s relationship with a good deal of appealing charm.

Watching My Blind Brother is one of those movie experiences where you think you know exactly what’s going to happen and how, but again, Goodhart’s script is much better than the basic storyline suggests, and though it ends exactly as it should, its caustic approach to the combative nature of Robbie and Bill’s relationship (exacerbated by Rose’s involvement with them both) elevates the material and aids the movie in avoiding being too lightweight or frivolous by comparison. If Robbie’s “advanced spatial awareness” means he moves around or picks things up a little too easily, then that’s a small quibble to make, but overall this is an enjoyable mix of the conventional and the unconventional that is well worth checking out.

Rating: 7/10 – a winning combination of comedy and drama that is easy to like and which is unafraid to try a slightly different approach to its basic rom-com storyline, My Blind Brother has an agreeableness to it that helps it stand out from the crowd; likely to be overlooked amongst all the other rom-coms that get released these days, it would be a shame if it failed completely to attract an audience, or missed out on the attention it deserves.

In 1947, Prince Seretse Khama of Bechuanaland (Oyelowo) was studying law in England when he met and fell in love with Ruth Williams (Pike), a clerk at a London-based law firm. Poised to inherit the position of King, Seretse’s relationship with a white woman caused concern among both the British government (who ruled over Bechuanaland as a proctectorate), and Seretse’s uncle, Tshekedi (Kunene), who was ruling as regent until Seretse was ready to ascend the throne. Faced with opposition on all sides – Ruth’s father effectively disowned her – the couple ignored warnings and approbation and eventually married in September 1948.

A political maelstrom ensued, and all intended to ensure that Seretse never became King. The British government, in the form of Alistair Canning (Davenport), their representative in South Africa, attempted to bully Seretse into renouncing his claim, but he stood firm, and both he and Ruth travelled to Bechuanaland (now modern day Botswana) to begin their life together. They received a muted welcome, with Ruth being treated with hostility by Seretse’s family, and Seretse’s uncle refusing to accept the marriage, or Seretse’s wish for them to work together to solve their country’s problems. With the people of Bechuanaland supporting Seretse’s claim to the throne (and his marriage), the British government tricked him into travelling to Britain, where in 1951, he was promptly informed that he and Ruth were being exiled from his home country for a period of five years (fortunately, Ruth stayed behind).

Back in Bechuanaland, Ruth discovered that she was pregnant. Her predicament proved beneficial in that it brought her closer to Seretse’s family, particularly his sister, Naledi (Pheto). With the women of Bechuanaland beginning to support her as well, Ruth did her best to support Seretse from afar, but with the British government proving intransigent in their attitude toward him, the would-be King was hindered at every turn. Eventually he found backing and support from members of the Labour Party, including Tony Benn (Lowden), and pressure was brought to bear. With the people of Britain voicing their dismay at the way in which Seretse and Ruth were being treated, a solution seemed on the horizon when Winston Churchill, ahead of the next General Election, announced he would rescind Seretse’s exile if the Conservatives won. They did win, but Seretse’s exile became even more of a political hot potato…

The story of Seretse Khama and Ruth Williams has been filmed before, as a TV drama in 1990 called A Marriage of Inconvenience. But where that version ran to an hour and focused more on their romance than the political upheaval that surrounded them, Amma Asante’s follow up to Belle (2013) aims to be a more comprehensive look at the trials and tribulations that affected both Seretse and Ruth, and an entire country. But as with so many historical dramas that have been made in recent years – The Birth of a Nation (2016), J. Edgar (2011), The Monuments Men (2014) – getting the balance right between historical accuracy and telling a compelling story is often the biggest problem of all. And so it proves with A United Kingdom, a movie that sets out to tell a fascinating tale wherein true love really does conquer all, but which somehow manages to fall short of making the impact it that should.

It begins well, placing the audience firmly in heritage picture-land, with convincing depictions of post-war London: its foggy streets, stoic populace, and rationing-led austerity. Seretse and Ruth’s courtship is depicted with a great deal of charm and it’s easy to see why these two fell in love with each other so easily and so readily, and despite the obvious social disapproval they would encounter (and on both sides of the racial divide, a theme that continues in Bechuanaland). Oyelowo and Pike have an easy-going chemistry, and it’s a delight to see them bring Seretse and Ruth together. Even the introduction of Davenport’s sneering, arrogant government representative can’t derail or diminish their love for each other. But this isn’t just a love story, it’s also a political drama, and once the movie switches from the gloomy back streets of London to the colourful plains of Bechuanaland, the movie changes tone and emphasis, and in doing so, loses sight of what has, up until now, made it so effective.

The trouble is that Seretse and Ruth’s relationship actually ceases being as relevant as it was before their arrival in Bechuanaland. Once there, the movie has to deal more directly with tribal politics, colonial do’s and don’t’s, government machinations, and the consequences of exile. Against all this and as a couple, Seretse and Ruth are required to take a back seat, as the wider world becomes more and more involved in their plight. Canning’s ruses and double dealings keep them marginalised, while the key to all their worries, Seretse’s uncle, disappears from the movie for around an hour. It’s left to British politicians to make the difference that’s needed, while Seretse lets himself become a figurehead for national change in Bechuanaland. And Ruth doesn’t fare any better, becoming a mother and gaining tribal respect. While this is important for the character, it has less impact than Guy Hibbert’s screenplay may have intended, and Pike is too often called upon to smile hopefully and talk in short, clichéd bursts.

Playing yet another important black historical figure after Dr Martin Luther King Jr in Selma (2014), Oyelowo is earnest, forthright, passionate in his dealings with Seretse’s people, and as the movie progresses, just a little on the dull side. It’s not Oyelowo’s fault; rather it seems that, by the time Seretse has been exiled, we’ve seen all there is to him. It’s a disconcerting thing to realise, and makes the movie’s second half more than a little disappointing as both central characters take an effective back seat in their own lives. Dramatically this is somewhat necessary – after all, they couldn’t be involved in all the background political manoeuvrings that occurred – but the downside is that the movie’s philosophical tagline, “No man is free who is not master of himself”, doesn’t feel quite as affirmative as it sounds.

Asante at least makes all those political manoeuvrings more interesting than expected (and easy to follow), and there’s some degree of humour to be derived from the way in which Canning and the rest of the British establishment receive their deserved come-uppance, but the movie ends on a triumphalist note that is a tad more simplistic than necessary (though it will send audiences away in a happy frame of mind). She also makes good use of the Botswanan locations, shooting in Seretse and Ruth’s real home at the time, and in the hospital where Ruth gave birth to their first child. Sam McCurdy’s cinematography is suitably drab and claustrophobic when in London, and beautifully airy when in Bechuanaland, making the movie hugely attractive to watch, and highlighting the impressive efforts of production designer Simon Bowles and costume designers Jenny Beavan and Anushia Nieradzik.

Rating: 7/10 – despite some prolonged stretches where the narrative either maintains the same tone from scene to scene, or it repeats itself (any scene between Seretse and Canning), A United Kingdom is still a movie that holds the attention and treats its real-life characters with respect and admiration; though not as powerful as it could have been, it’s still a movie that has the undeniable charm of a well-mounted heritage picture, and more besides.

These days, Westerns come and go infrequently, but largely seem to be a cause for (minor) celebration. A genre that had its heyday in the Fifties and Sixties, the Western was a simple beast, telling classic tales of good versus evil (white hats versus black hats, cowboys versus Indians), until they got darker, more symbolic, and infused with heavy psychological importance. In the last twenty years, the Western has lain relatively dormant. But for some movie makers, the Western is a genre that’s ripe for re-evaluation and examination. Ti West, who has made his name on the back of a run of horror thrillers, is one such movie maker. And so, we have In a Valley of Violence, his “tribute” to the Western genre.

It begins with a recognisable Western encounter. A lone rider (Hawke) comes upon a priest (Gorman), who’s stranded thanks to a lame mule. He’s looking to get to the nearest town, Denton, but needs help. He pulls a gun on the lone rider, but it has no effect whatsoever; the man doesn’t appear worried in the slightest. The next thing the priest knows, the man’s dog has him by his gun arm, and the tables have been turned in an instant. The man doesn’t kill him, though. Instead, he takes the priest’s water and the bullets from his gun, and lets him live. He rides off, heading for Mexico, and at first, he’s intending to avoid Denton, but when he sees what kind of a detour he’d need to make to avoid it, he decides passing through is the better option. As long as he doesn’t draw any attention to himself…

Ten minutes in and already we’re in classic Western territory (almost as classic as its New Mexico setting). We’ve got the tactiturn, quick-witted loner (whose name we later discover is Paul), and we have a supporting character in the priest that you can be sure will make another appearance later on. And then there’s Denton, a town that, according to the priest, is “run by sinners”. As Paul heads into town, the viewer could almost be asking themselves, “What could possibly go wrong?” The answer is as obvious as the scar on the side of Paul’s face: everything.

And at first, it looks as if West is going to honour all the staples of a Western movie. The loner rides into town, and within minutes is being challenged by the town bully, a loudmouth by the name of Gilly Martin (Ransone). A showdown is on the cards, as Gilly goads the stranger in town into a gunfight. But here’s where West wrong foots the audience, and instead of a classic gunfight in the middle of the street, Gilly’s efforts to call out Paul meet with quiet dismissal. Until Gilly realises that Paul’s dog is across the street and makes a threatening move towards it. It’s too much for Paul: he comes out, water bowl for the dog in hand, throws it at Gilly, and when he catches it, Paul punches him once in the face and lays him out. Not a shot fired, not even a gun drawn out of a holster. The lead-up is stretched out, but the fight is short, and the outcome is funny as all hell. We’re in classic Western territory all right, but somewhere along the way, West has taken his audience down a different trail, and though quite a lot of what follows cleaves to the staples mentioned above, it’s clear that West is going to put his own spin on things.

But therein lies the problem with the movie as a whole: it’s a classic Western that’s been bent out of shape, and though it looks like a Western, and it sounds like a Western (even down to Jeff Grace’s Morricone-inspired score), it’s only a Western in terms of its starting-off point. Once Paul throws that bowl, we’re in a whole different kind of Western altogether, and a lot of it doesn’t fit together. There’s a lot of sly humour here, and while it would be unfair to pin the blame for the movie’s unevenness on the humour alone, it does contribute greatly to the sense that West, while he definitely wanted to make a Western, didn’t quite know what kind of Western he wanted to make. As a result, bullets do fly, and revenge is placed firmly on the table as a motivating force for the violence, but there are other elements – sibling rivalry, public confidence in the town marshal (Travolta), bravery and cowardice co-existing at the same time in most of the characters, lead-footed moments of irony – that are part of the material, and which serve to either slow down the movie, or make it seem ragged and unfocused.

The other problem is with the characters themselves, archetypes that are also twisted out of shape. At one pivotal point in the narrative, Paul is ambushed by Gilly and his men. West can’t decide from one moment to the next if Paul should be angry, upset, fearful for his life, pleading, or stubborn in the face of imminent death, and so has him be all of these things. Hawke’s a great actor, but even he can’t pull off all that. When we meet the marshal, we find he has a wooden leg and is of a temperament to let his son get a beating from a stranger (yes, Gilly is his son), and not pursue it because he knows what his son is like. The wooden leg proves to be incidental, while the decision to send Paul on his way, proves to be an awkward way of allowing the revenge angle to be introduced. Gilly himself is vainglorious and stupid, and vacillates between the two, sometimes in the same scene. As a result, Ransone has a hard time keeping him even remotely credible as a character. Farmiga is the sixteen-year-old whose husband has left her(!) and wants to leave town (but won’t do it unless a man takes her with him), while Gillan (as her sister) gets to screech a lot at Ransone, and generally behave like a spoilt brat. While many Westerns play up the stereotypes of the genre, usually it’s a welcome gambit – a movie shorthand, if you will – but here, the impression given is that West wasn’t too interested in having his characters interact or behave in a way that the audience could identify or sympathise with.

Visually, West does provide enough cues and familiar set ups to make his Western look and feel authentic, and the town of Denton is cleverly realised, from its boarded up church and empty saloon, to the absence of its townsfolk or any thriving businesses. It’s a ghost town in the making, and what better way to help it on its way than to bring in a lone stranger to kill most of the people who still remain there? Of course, being a Western there’s plenty of violence, and West doesn’t skimp on making it impactful and severe, with Fessenden and Ransone in particular suffering quite nastily at Hawke’s hands (and cutthroat razor, and boot). But again, there’s that humour to soften the blow, but it’s not as successful in that respect as West has probably intended. Instead the two elements sit together unhappily, with neither elevating the other.

Something of a vanity project for West, the movie does work for the most part, but there are too many occasions where the awkward mix of styles and elements derails the narrative, and brings everything up short. This leads to the movie having an awkward rhythm as well, with some scenes extended beyond their ability to be effective, or to advance the various storylines. Hawke is a great choice for the lead role, while Travolta appears to be having more fun than he’s had on a movie set in years. There’s enough to admire here without feeling that West has done his audience a disservice, but there’s also enough here to leave said audience also feeling that he hasn’t quite done enough for them either.

Rating: 6/10 – ambitious but ultimately disappointing given West’s track record so far, In a Valley of Violence never really reconciles itself as to what kind of Western it wants to be; Hawke and Travolta make for appealing adversaries, and there’s a sense that if West had adopted a more straightforward approach, this could have been the classic modern Western he was (perhaps) aiming for.

It’s any father’s nightmare: that the daughter he adores meets a man that she adores but whom the father hates. Such is the case in Why Him?, where Bryan Cranston’s struggling businessman dad, Ned Fleming (he owns a printing company), and his wife, Barb (Mullally) are invited to meet their daughter’s new boyfriend. Their daughter, Stephanie (Deutch), has kept quiet about her new boyfriend, Laird Mayhew (Franco), but as it’s Xmas, she thinks it’s a good idea for everyone to start getting to know each other. But Laird, who owns a video game company and is very, very successful, is also a bit of a loose cannon. He swears a lot, behaves inappropriately, appears to have few or no filters at all, and spends his money seemingly at random and on random things.

Despite his efforts to impress Ned, Laird doesn’t make it easy for himself, and soon learns that Ned doesn’t trust him. Furthermore, when Laird asks for Ned’s blessing so he can propose to Stephanie, the answer is an emphatic No. Laird is persistent, though, and tells Ned that by the time it’s Xmas Day (three days later), he will have won over Ned, and he’ll have his blessing. Ned thinks that is highly unlikely. A wager is made, and Laird does his best to get Ned to like him, but it’s not so easy, and the road to mutual respect is littered with the best of intentions, a few misunderstandings, and the appearance of two real-life rock stars.

However you look at it, Why Him? is a reasonably funny, yet also stupidly awful comedy that relies on its very talented cast to get itself out of quite a few holes (plot- and otherwise). It’s also an awkward mix of culture and generational clashes that rely heavily on clichés and predictable responses from both Ned and Laird as it chugs steadily along the path of least dramatic resistance in its need to be as heartfelt as it is puerile. This is the movie’s biggest flaw: it wants to be humorously crude and shocking in the same fashion as, say, some of Franco’s other recent work (that is, as bluntly as possible), and yet it also wants to be warm-hearted and decent. In the end, decent wins out, but there’s always the feeling that writer/director Hamburg and his screenwriting cohort Ian Helfer didn’t actually know at first which way things were going to work out.

But the movie has a trump card in the form of its casting, with Cranston playing the uptight dad to perfection, and providing the equally perfect foil to Franco’s crass, whacko video game designer. Mullally, who some may remember as the self-serving über-bitch Karen from TV’s Will & Grace, is kept largely in the background but then excels in an hilarious scene where she attempts to seduce Cranston while completely drunk. Deutch does well as the movie’s nominal “straight man”, and Gluck combines the best attributes of both Cranston and Franco’s characters as Stephanie’s younger brother, Scotty. But as is so often the case, it’s one of the supporting characters who proves the most effective. Step forward Keegan-Michael Key as Gustav, Laird’s estate manager who also doubles as this movie’s version of Cato from the Pink Panther series. The movie steps up a notch every time he appears, and if there has to be a spin-off, then Why Gustav? might not be such a bad idea.

Rating: 6/10 – not as obvious or objectionable as it appears to be, Why Him? struggles to maintain a consistent tone throughout, but has a good success rate when it comes to providing big laughs; good performances help paper over some very rough cracks indeed, but overall it’s an enjoyable movie that often tries too hard in its efforts to be edgy, and which doesn’t always seem able to rein itself in for the better.

If you’ve seen the trailer for Justice League (2017) – and it appears millions of you have – then ask yourself this: did you spot anything that gave you an idea as to the actual storyline? Or did it seem like just another Warner Bros./DCEU trailer that was only concerned with showing off how much action will be included? And lastly, does anyone at this stage hold out any hope that this will be an improvement on Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)?

A throwback to the kind of big budget adventure stories made in the Seventies and Eighties, with location filming designed to heighten the events shown, The Lost City of Z concerns the efforts of military man turned explorer Perceval “Percy” Fawcett (Hunnam) to find a city he believes is hidden somewhere in the Amazonian jungle. Covering the years between 1905 and 1925, the movie introduces us to Fawcett the military man while he’s posted to Ireland, and finding it difficult to advance through the ranks thanks to what a senior officer refers to as, “an unfortunate choice in ancestors”. Good fortune arrives in the form of a secondment to the Royal Geographical Society, where he is asked to map an area of jungle on the Brazil-Bolivia border.

Fawcett accepts the commission, and finds himself in the company of fellow military men Henry Costin (Pattinson) and Arthur Manley (Ashley). While they carry out their task, Fawcett finds what he believes is evidence of an advanced civilisation that once existed within the jungle but which has remained, until now, undiscovered. When he returns to England, and presents his findings to the RGS, they and he are ridiculed, and the idea that the indigenous tribes are anything but “savages” is dismissed. Fawcett does, however, find an ally in RGS member James Murray (Macfadyen), who agrees to fund a further expedition in search of what Fawcett is calling “the lost city of Z”. And so in 1911, Fawcett, accompanied again by Costin and Manley, and with Murray in tow, returns to the Bolivian jungle.

The expedition, however, suffers a series of setbacks, from the loss of equipment to Murray’s inability to deal with the harsh, uncompromising environment. Forced to turn back despite Fawcett’s conviction that they are close to finding the lost city, the trio return home just as war in Europe breaks out. They find themselves fighting together in France, and during a push across the Somme in 1916, Fawcett falls victim to a chlorine gas attack and is temporarily blinded. Invalided out of the Army, Fawcett believes his exploring days are now behind him. That is, until his son, Jack (Holland), convinces him that they should travel together to Bolivia, and make one more effort to find the lost city. And so, in 1925, the pair set off into the jungle in an effort to prove once and for all that the fabled city and its ancient civilisation did exist.

Based on the book The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon (2009) by David Grann, James Gray’s adaptation is sincere, meticulously researched, beautifully shot by Darius Khondji, engaging on a Boys’ Own adventure level, and yet, despite everyone’s best efforts, not as interesting to watch as it should be. The tale of Fawcett’s obsession should be strong, compelling stuff, but thanks to Gray’s adaptation covering such a long period of time, the movie suffers from being episodic, and as a result, feels hesitant in some scenes and overly confident in others. Gray handles the material well, but the narrative’s stop-start approach – something that Gray in both roles as screenwriter and director fails to find a solution for – means that it’s always difficult for the viewer to maintain interest in a story that, ultimately, isn’t going to lead anywhere.

If you already know the outcome of Fawcett’s third expedition to the Bolivian jungle, then this movie won’t necessarily be of interest. Having to wade through a succession of failures before this point, the movie does its best to make each disappointment and setback in Fawcett’s life part of a never-give-up, never-say-die attitude that drives the man forward, but the key word in Grann’s title – “obsession” – never really applies, and that’s partly due to Gray’s script, which never portrays Fawcett as passionate in his beliefs. It’s also due to Hunnam’s less-than-charismatic performance, one that will have viewers wondering why Costin and Manley stick with Fawcett for so long, and how he managed to attract backers for his second and third expeditions. Watching the movie, it gives the impression that the idea of a hidden civilisation in the Bolivian jungle is more enticing than the idea of Fawcett being the man to lead the search.

The expeditions themselves lack any tension, even when Fawcett and his companions encounter a tribe of cannibals, and though Gray shows an impressive capacity for framing the jungle scenes in such a way that they feel other-worldly, these sections of the movie go by without making as much of an impact as Gray was no doubt aiming for. There are also signposted moments that are straight out of Predictable Storytelling 101, such as when Fawcett holds a book up in front of his face and an arrow pierces it, stopping just inches away from hitting him. Or the moment where Murray demands an apology from Fawcett, and he agrees to do so, and then turns and apologises to Costin and Manley instead.

Also problematical is Fawcett’s relationship with his wife, Nina (Miller). She accepts his going to Bolivia in 1906, and is supportive of the trip. But when it comes time for the 1911 trip, Nina wants to go with him, and the pair have an awkward argument where Fawcett plays down her physical ability to make the journey there and back, and she argues that she has endured childbirth (twice by now) and if she can weather that particular experience then the jungle shouldn’t be any worse. Again, it’s an awkward exchange that feels out-of-place – and designed to give Miller something to do other than play the otherwise doting wife – and feels even more out-of-place when their oldest son, Jack, suggests a third trip and she agrees without so much as a murmur. Perhaps Gray felt the need to include a slice of proto-feminism amongst all the testosterone flying around, but if so, it’s not something that works.

By the time Fawcett and his eldest son get to Bolivia, viewers will probably be wondering how this is all going to pan out. Those in the know will find Gray’s choice of endings (technically, there are three) unlikely, overly poignant, and at odds with the tone of the movie thus far. That said, Gray does give Miller another chance to stand out from the overwhelmingly male cast, and while wish fulfilment is the order of the day, it sits uncomfortably with what we know of Fawcett and that last trip.

Overall, The Lost City of Z is a sterile drama that never hits any emotional highs and struggles to provide the audience with a sense of just how important Fawcett’s search for a hidden civilisation really was back in the Georgian era (or even if it was). There’s the usual degree of sexism sitting alongside the kind of blinkered attitudes that seem to define the period, and though Gray keeps the movie interesting on a visual level, with spectacular scenery and beautifully composed individual shots aplenty, it’s on a dramatic level that the movie fails to gain traction, becoming a succession of scenes that aim for a classic adventure feel, but which lack the depth to elevate it to such lofty heights. An adventure then, but one that offers scant reward for both its characters’ efforts, and the audience’s.

Rating: 6/10 – not as compelling or as rich in detail as viewers will need in order to gain maximum enjoyment from it, The Lost City of Z wastes its potential by making Fawcett’s “obsession” a strictly pedestrian affair; Gray delivers on the production side but can’t seem to work his magic on his own script or the cast, leaving the movie feeling like it’s always about to step up a gear while remaining steadfastly in neutral.

In the wake of World War II, German POWs were sent to various places along the Danish coast with a view to their being used to clear the beaches of landmines. The fact that they were expendable made them the perfect choice for the job, and the Danes had no compunction about putting them in harm’s way (though they did train them beforehand). It was a large-scale operation, using approximately two thousand Germans – most of them barely out of their teens – to clear approximately two million landmines. And the Danes were in a hurry.

This is the background to Martin Zandvliet’s sparse yet rigorous post-War drama, Land of Mine. The German soldiers co-opted for the task are young, inexperienced for the most part, and looking forward to going back home… until the Danes come calling in the form of Lt. Ebbe Jensen (Følsgaard). He teaches them the basics of how to disarm a landmine, and then sends fourteen of them off to the coast and into the care of Sgt Carl Rasmussen (Møller). Rasmussen’s antipathy toward them is soon evidenced by his lack of concern when food supplies aren’t delivered, and the Germans begin to scavenge for food, all of which leads to sickness amongst the men and the first fatality within the group.

Despite their initial fears, the Germans unite as a team, and their conscientious approach to their work begins to pay off. A natural leader emerges, Sebastian Schumann (Hofmann), and he and Rasmussen begin to forge a relationship based on mutual respect, a situation that catches the Danish sergeant by surprise. He softens his attitude toward the men, and even brings them food from the Danish army camp further inland. Eventually, he even removes the barricade on the men’s barracks that keeps them locked in at night. Another fatality occurs, an unforeseen event that serves to make one of the men, Helmut Morbach (Basman), question the likelihood of their ever returning home. It’s an unpopular idea, but when a further death has a profound effect on Rasmussen, his reaction only serves to reinforce Morbach’s paranoia, and the men are faced with the very real possibility that all their lives will be forfeited there on the beaches.

Despite its simple storyline and set up, Land of Mine is resolutely not a simplistic tale. There’s far too much going on than it appears at first glance, and Zandvliet (working from his own script) has forged a powerful, compelling portrait of commitment under pressure, both in the relationships between the men (including Rasmussen), and in the disabling of the landmines. Zandvliet shows that, even in the worst of circumstances, bonds can be formed between even the unlikeliest of adversaries. When we first meet Rasmussen he’s in a jeep watching a large group of German POWs trudging past him on the road. He assaults one of them, displaying a deep-rooted anger towards the German soldiers that doesn’t augur well for his future charges.

For their part, the German POWs who are selected to clear the beaches are too young to have seen any meaningful action during the war, and aren’t to be blamed for the decisions made by their elders. They all look ahead to the time when they’ll be back home in Germany and making their way, fruitfully, in the world. Even though the odds are against them (and nearly half of the two thousand Germans made to remove the mines were either killed or maimed for life), these young men still have the capacity to look forward to a better, brighter future. It’s this optimism in the face of grim experience that helps give the movie a positive spin, one that’s sorely needed to balance the inevitability of their dying. And once Rasmussen discovers he can respect them as people, and not just German soldiers, then that optimism flares brightly, and in contrast to the flare of the explosions that threaten them every day.

As well as hope and optimism, the movie dwells on camaraderie and the notion of friendship under fire, but to a lesser extent. It still manages to explore the nature of reliance on others in extreme circumstances (both emotionally and practically), but it does so in an understated manner that complements the restraint Zandvliet shows in handling the narrative. This isn’t a showy, flashy movie intent on making eye candy out of explosive situations. Rather, it’s a stringent, occasionally profound meditation on the human ability to find something worth saving or fighting for in the worst of situations. All of these men confront death each day, and all of these men find strength in having each other around them.

Land of Mine‘s introspective qualities are highlighted by the performances. Møller is the nominal “angry man”, ruled by his prejudices until he realises the Germans are just young men thrown into the war like cannon fodder – just like they are when they’re on the beaches. Møller adopts a stern, patrician gaze for most of his scenes, but when Rasmussen lets down his guard (in his scenes with Sebastian), the one-time career criminal turned actor shows that he has a natural talent for portraying a character’s inner workings and thoughts. Relaxing into the role with every scene, Møller is the one cast member who draws the eye throughout, and his transformation from “angry man” to unacknowledged friend and back again to “angry man” is convincing because he’s sincere and there’s an equally sincere sense of purpose in his approach to the role.

The rest of the cast are more than capable, and provide impressive support when needed, particularly Hofmann as the thoughtful, clever Sebastian, and Emil Belton as one of two brothers, Ernst, whose sadness at the loss of his sibling leads to both triumph and tragedy in the same scene. Zandvliet never compromises with the characters, and manages to make them all feel like fully rounded human beings, ones that you could imagine being stuck in such horrendous circumstances. They populate a beautiful stretch of the Danish coastline, locations that are historically authentic, and Camilla Hjelm’s bright, stately cinematography adds a lustre to the movie that makes it seem hyper-real in places, with the blinding white of the beaches reflecting back off the blue skies above in striking fashion. Between them, she and Zandvliet have crafted a visual aesthetic that belies the grim nature of the material, and which instinctively elevates the movie beyond that of yet another post-War drama where enemies learn to respect each other.

Rating: 9/10 – its nomination in the Best Foreign Language Film category at this year’s Oscars may have surprised some people, but Land of Mine was a worthy nominee, and it’s a movie that is well worth seeking out; bold, absorbing, and in places, delicately nuanced, this is a triumph of low-key yet resonant movie making, and full of neat directorial touches that confirm Zandvliet is a director who knows exactly what he’s doing.

The awkwardly titled Viceroy’s House opens with a quote by Winston Churchill: “History is written by the victors.” Bearing in mind the story that follows, it’s hard to see why this particular quote has been chosen to open the movie. Perhaps director Gurinder Chadha is using it in an ironic fashion; any winners borne out of the terrible circumstances and outcomes surrounding the partition of India in 1947 may not have been aware of their having “won” anything at the time – even those who wanted the creation of Pakistan.

One thing that soon becomes apparent from watching the movie is that it’s going to be a politics-lite experience, with little depth beyond that given to an adaptation being shown on UK Sunday evening television. This means that some viewers, especially those with little awareness of the period when the British withdrew from India, and the terrible consequences that followed, will take much of what the movie tells them to heart. What should be made clear from the start is that Viceroy’s House is better viewed as an impression of those events than as a recreation.

The problem here is that one of the most traumatic upheavals of the 20th Century that involved a country and fifteen million of its inhabitants – those who were displaced – is given an unremarkable soap opera sheen that paints the British as saviours, and the Indian people as the authors of their own downfall. As an interpretation of what actually occurred on the Indian sub-continent, the movie takes several factual liberties with the events surrounding partition, and panders to the idea that the frustration experienced by Lord Louis Mountbatten (known more familiarly as “Dickie”) (Bonneville) is somehow more affecting and deserving of our sympathy than the political and social upheavals being experienced by India’s Hindu, Muslim and Sikh communities. As a dramatic approach to the material, it’s akin to asking an audience to be more sympathetic towards someone with a slight case of sunburn than someone who’s lost a limb.

The obvious comparison here is with the TV series Upstairs, Downstairs (or Downton Abbey for that matter, which also stars Bonneville). By attempting to focus on both the political machinations going on above stairs and the social upheavals occurring below stairs, Viceroy’s House tries to show the effect of partition on the British and the Indians alike. But the script – by Paul Mayeda Berges, Moira Buffini, and Chadha – takes an uncomfortable approach to the historical material, and tries to add a standard Romeo and Juliet-style romance to proceedings through the attraction between valet Jeet Kumar (Dayal) and lady’s attendant Aalia Noor (Qureshi). Alas, and despite the best efforts of Dayal and Qureshi, their romance is a tepid affair that occupies too much screen time, and lacks the kind of epic passion that could be seen as a compelling reflection of the violent passions of a country expressing itself through mounting conflict.

Other members of the Viceroy’s staff have arguments and cause problems from time to time, and Mountbatten is seen to berate them as if they were all naughty children. It’s a condescending attitude that extends to Mountbatten’s meetings with India’s leading politicians. Whether it’s Nehru (Ghani), Jinnah (Smith) or Ghandi (Dabi), the movie has “Dickie” treating them as if they should all just get along because he needs them to. And as a sop to the current need for strong female characters in pretty much every movie being made, Lady Edwina Mountbatten (Anderson) is portrayed as the “brains of the outfit”, while at the same time falling victim to the idea that their predicament is worse than that of the Indian people (“How can it be getting worse under us?”).

As the inevitability of partition looms ever nearer, and outbreaks of violence become the norm, Mountbatten is pushed into a corner and forced to accept that there can’t be a united India. With Pakistan now a certainty, he’s required to divide India into two, and enlists British lawyer Sir Cyril Radcliffe (Callow) to carry out the task. But it proves too difficult, until he’s advised by General Ismay (Gambon), Mountbatten’s advisor on all things Indian and political, that there is a solution. It’s here that the movie cements its appreciation and sympathy for the Viceroy by showing him as having been tricked by the British Government and set up for a fall if the violence continues and/or escalates out of control. It’s a moment that should elicit a good deal of compassion for “poor old” Mountbatten, but instead makes the viewer realise that Chadha feels more for him than she does for the Indian people.

Much else in the movie is perfunctory stuff designed to move the story forward with the least amount of effort or acknowledgment as to how dry and uninvolving it all is. Chadha directs with a minimum of fuss or apparent enthusiasm, leaving some scenes feeling cursory and superficial. Against this, the cast can only do their best, though Anderson manages to imbue Lady Mountbatten with a supportive, agreeable nature that makes her feel like more of a fully rounded character than anyone else. Bonneville is a good choice for “Dickie” (though he doesn’t look anything like him), but even he’s held back by a script that paints Mountbatten, somewhat plainly, as a good man in a bad situation (though if you need someone to portray “pained frustration” then Bonneville’s your man).

For someone whose family were involved in the partition and the subsequent resettlement of so many people, Chadha doesn’t always seem interested in telling a coherent, responsible story. Muslims are unlikely to be happy about the way in which they are shown to be the main instigators of the violence depicted, while the religious enmities between Muslims and Hindus are reduced to petty squabbling, a direction that is extended to the encounters between Nehru and Jinnah – if you believe the movie, then neither man could be in the same room as the other without resorting to childish bickering. By reducing the key players’ importance in this way, and by playing up the ineffective nature of Mountbatten’s tenure as Viceroy, the movie ends up paying lip service to a terrible period in India’s history, a period that deserves a much more focused and intelligent approach than is featured here.

Rating: 4/10 – sporadically effective as a heritage picture, Viceroy’s House is let down by its one-sided consideration of British colonialism, and by its insistence on depicting Indians of the time as quarreling malcontents; nowhere is freedom from oppression expressed as forcibly as needed, and the movie’s tacit exoneration of Great Britain’s often brutal occupation makes for an uncomfortable viewing experience throughout.

Here on thedullwoodexperiment it’s often the case that a review will question why a movie was made in the first place. Sometimes it just seems incredible that no one – seriously, no one – saw how a movie was progressing during production and didn’t say anything along the lines of, “Hey guys, this isn’t really very good, shouldn’t we just call it quits and save ourselves the embarrassment?” With low-budget movies it’s a little more forgivable. Fewer resources and an inexperienced cast and crew should always be taken into consideration, even if the end result fails to meet any and all expectations; at least the movie makers have tried their best (and even if their best proves to be their worst). Good intentions can mean a lot.

But then there are movies that are made by established, world-renowned production companies such as New Line Cinema, and/or released by equally world-renowned distributors such as Warner Bros. These movies get a wider shot at audiences than those made by independents or first-timers, and have a wider chance of making their production costs back. But when you watch them, it’s like watching a movie where the least amount of thought and consideration has gone into them, from the script to the cinematography to the editing to the soundtrack to the acting to the directing to the whole tone of the thing. It’s like watching the movie version of a contractual obligation.

And so we have Wolves at the Door, the latest movie to fit the criteria listed above. Based on “true events”, the movie recounts what happened over two particular nights in Los Angeles in August 1969. First we witness the early morning home invasion of a couple (Kaczmarek, Mulkey) that results in the couple being frightened for their lives but suffering no actual physical harm. A detective (Ladin) tells them that there have been a lot of similar incidents recently, but that this is something different. Cue the next evening and four friends having dinner together. The quartet – eight months pregnant Sharon (Cassidy), and her friends, Jay (Fisher), and couple Abigail (Henstridge) and Wojciech (Campbell) – are commiserating over Abigail’s imminent trip to Boston. They head back to Sharon’s home, intending to continue their “commiserations”.

Another friend, Steven (Adams), is there too, but he’s spending more time with the property’s caretaker, William (Daniels), who lives in a separate building. When he parts company with William, Steven encounters a strange man and woman who stop him from leaving the estate. Meanwhile, Wojciech, upset by Abigail’s decision to move to Boston, decides to get some air. He too encounters the strangers. Inside, Jay settles on the sofa to watch TV while Sharon and Abigail begin to hear strange noises. At one point, they see a strange woman in the house. Though scared, they still attempt to find out why the woman is there, but soon they both realise that there’s more than just the one stranger, and that the four friends are all in danger.

If you made the effort you could watch Wolves at the Door without knowing anything about it; which would be a blessing of sorts. If you managed to avoid reading any reviews, or hearing any word of mouth reports, or even seeing the poster with its give-away tagline, then there’s a certain degree of intrigue that will attach itself to the viewing experience. You’d be asking yourself why is all this happening, and you’d also be waiting for the four friends to turn the table on their attackers and come out on top (after the requisite amount of violent reprisals and bloodshed). But this isn’t that kind of movie, and it’s that tagline that gives it all away. For yes, this isn’t based on “true events” in the sense that it takes something that happened and fashions a different story around those events. No, this is a movie that takes those events and purports to be a recreation of those events – mostly.

Putting aside the movie’s appropriation of the Tate murders for mild exploitation purposes, what is more distressing is the absence of any connection with the characters themselves, and especially as they’re based on real people. The movie leaves Sharon Tate and her friends with no discernible personalities, lets the cast behave like approximations of the people they’re portraying, and doesn’t even try to engage the audience’s sympathy for the terrible things that happen to them. The viewer can only watch, distant and uninvolved, as the Manson Family members terrorise and attack the four friends (and Steven), and keep their motives unexplained (until the movie’s coda). It could all be happening to any group of strangers, and again it’s odd that with the movie being based on “true events”, the producers have decided to adopt an approach that reduces the impact of real people being attacked and killed to that achieved by a below-average slasher movie.

It doesn’t help that Gary Dauberman’s script is uninterested in telling a coherent story in the first place. The story of the Tate murders is one that’s ripe for a powerful, impactful movie, but this plods along employing standard horror movie clichés and failing to provide any tension. Despite the short running time, there are still plenty of scenes that could be removed and not be missed thanks to Dauberman’s disjointed approach to structure, and the absence of any appreciable imagination. He also has a tin ear for dialogue, saddling the cast with the kind of lines that would defeat even the most inspired casting. In terms of the cast, Cassidy and Henstridge are the nominal stars, but they’re soon reduced to crying, hiding, running about and making stupid decisions without any regard for logic or credibility, while everyone else involved has to hope that their performances survive the arbitrary decisions made by director Leonetti and editor Ken Blackwell at the assembly stage.

As the director, John R. Leonetti reminds audiences why he’s better off in his regular day job as a cinematographer, but at the same time, leaves those same audiences perplexed by his encouraging the kind of dimly-lit, murky photography that leaves this movie looking so bland and unremarkable, and which adopts the same kind of predictable framing and shot construction that we’ve seen so many, many times before in the realm of low-budget horror. All of this adds up to a flat, generic, dull movie that someone should have pointed out wasn’t going to work however much everyone tried – because it doesn’t seem as if anyone was. So once again, audiences are left with a movie that doesn’t work, is beyond lacklustre, and which can’t even manage the energy to be at least partially interesting.

Rating: 2/10 – a movie that reinforces the idea that some projects are just exercises in going through the motions, Wolves at the Door takes a real life tragedy and makes it seem trivial in comparison; and as if that wasn’t bad enough, it’s just plain awful.

They say that humour is subjective, that what one person finds funny is likely to leave another person unmoved. But what if a joke is deemed offensive? And what if that joke, or comment, is deemed so offensive that the person making the joke is condemned by an audience member, or perhaps the whole audience, or worse still, thousands (perhaps millions) of social media users? How does that work, and why is it happening so often in the United States? Why has free speech come under so much threat, and why is one person’s idea of free speech more important than someone else’s? Why, in short, are so many people now quick to be or feel offended?

This is the central conundrum of Can We Take a Joke?, a documentary that explores the notion that if you tell a joke that’s offensive, and someone takes offence against that joke, then they’re right to do so, and it’s the comedian’s fault for stepping over the line – deliberately or not. It seems outrage is all the rage now, as jokes have to pass a kind of cultural litmus test of what’s acceptable and what’s not. And woe betide you if you’re the one stepping over that line, because you will be pilloried. And don’t think that you’ll find support from the liberals in America, because in reality, they’ve become even more stringent than the conservatives. What’s a comedian to do? The answer’s easy: keep on doing what you’re doing.

The movie takes us back to the early Sixties and the rise to prominence of Lenny Bruce, the godfather of modern comedy. Bruce was uncompromising and he regularly skewered the fascist tendencies of a heirarchy that ensured the police were in attendance at his shows, waiting to arrest him if he said anything the authorities deemed offensive or inflammatory or obscene. The point here is that no one in the audience at a Lenny Bruce gig ever complained or said they were outraged or offended. The end result of Bruce’s several arrests? Since then, not one comedian has been arrested for being offensive, inflammatory or obscene. Progress, then. Except, as Can We Take a Joke? shows, in the years since, there has been a sea change, a growing reluctance by some people to accept that comedians can, and will, use offensive material in their routines.

Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t ask why this has happened. It makes the point – and it’s rightly a bit of a blow to realise – that some audiences are now less tolerant of political satire, or attacks on sexist and racist attitudes, or just about anything that they don’t like. And they are increasingly vocal about it, whether they’re heckling performers (sometimes they’re organised, as at a college show that was advertised as deliberately offensive), or taking to social media outlets such as Facebook and/or Twitter in order to make their intolerance known. The movie shows just how pervasive this intolerance can be through the restrictions put on comedians when they do campus gigs – some, like Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld won’t perform at campuses because they have to self-censor their material – and the unfortunate tale of Justine Sacco, who in 2013 tweeted, “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” She tweeted this while at Heathrow Airport, then turned off her mobile phone. Eleven-and-a-half hours later, she arrived in South Africa, turned her mobile back on, and discovered that her tweet had generated enough online outrage that she lost her job.

Sacco’s tweet was clearly ill-considered, but the sheer scale of the backlash against her was also clearly disproportionate. So why is comedy targeted in this way, and why do the complainers and the outraged respond with such venom? Again, the movie doesn’t have an answer. What it does have is a roster of comedians who are recognised for their use of offensive material in their acts. The movie’s quick to make the point: what do audiences expect if they go to see comedians like Lisa Lampanelli or Gilbert Gottfried? These are comedians who are renowned for the offensive nature of their material, for the challenging, uncomfortable mirror they hold up to the rest of society. And they’re condemned for doing so, and all because it seems that modern audiences have no idea about context, or perversely, won’t tolerate the idea of free speech if it goes against their own ideas about what’s funny and what isn’t.

So, with the battle lines drawn, what’s a comedian to do? The answer appears to be, go on the offensive (no pun intended). None of the interviewees are prepared to back down, and some, like comedian and podcaster Adam Carolla are actively attempting to challenge the anti-free speech brigade while continuing to engage in the kind of comedy routines that are likely to rile said brigade in the first place. There’s a hint that Carolla is just as militant in his opinions as the people who take exception to offensive jokes or routines or shows. But the movie skirts round this particular possibility, and provides a succession of comic talking heads who espouse their own distaste with the people who don’t like their material. There’s an irony here that seems lost on director Balaker and his production team, and which allows for a certain amount of mirth as we see nominally thick-skinned comedians criticise the people who criticise them.

In the end, the movie asks a lot of questions, makes several relevant points, provides a few clever insights (mostly thanks to author and activist Jonathan Rauch), but lacks both balance and answers. That the movie lacks balance isn’t necessarily a negative, as it’s clear that Can We Take a Joke? is intended as a riposte to the very hyperbolic hysteria that seems to follow in the wake of offensive material being aired. That it doesn’t offer the “other side” a voice is likely to upset some viewers, but the idea that a fair-minded approach should be mandatory in documentaries is ridiculous; how would any debate on any issue ever get started? And as for answers, the movie’s relatively short running time and plethora of questions doesn’t allow for too many answers, and those that it includes are all from the comedians getting to air their views unchallenged.

If there is one answer that the movie does accept (and wholeheartedly at that) is the one to its title. That answer is definitely: no. But if it’s no because tastes have changed, or because society is less tolerant of so-called taboo subjects (for some reason), or because of some hidden agenda within society itself – well, these are the questions that aren’t addressed but could have been. The movie’s one over-riding consensus is that offensive comedy is good and venomous criticism is bad. This may be true (if a little trite), but then we’re back to the same point made at the beginning of this review: that humour is subjective, and that will always be the case.

Rating: 7/10 – a documentary that has a tendency to waste too much of its short running time on repeating the same claims re: the necessity for offensive comedy, Can We Take a Joke? is nevertheless a caustic response to those who feel it isn’t; by accepting that there is a need (though without explaining why), the movie doesn’t always do justice to the questions it asks, but as a platform for debate, it’s much more successful.

Choose life, choose four characters who have led miserable lives for the past twenty years and can’t overcome their failings. Choose redemption if only because it sounds good and it might make you feel better. Choose old friends, however much they might hate you, because making new ones is too difficult. Choose Scotland. Choose to make amends. Choose the past over the future because it’s safer. Choose remorse. Choose anger at seeing your dreams go unfulfilled, and try to make new dreams to stop yourself from feeling angry. Choose revenge if remorse won’t work. Choose life over a slow, drawn-out, painful trudge towards non-existence. Choose drugs to soothe or melt away the pain of choosing life. And choose the path of least resistence so that choices become easy. Choose football, music, sex, anything to make the emptiness inside you feel less overwhelming. But above all, choose life, and live it with everything you’ve got, even when you feel that you don’t have anything to offer, and if you did, that no one would want it.

Twenty-one years on from the events depicted in Trainspotting (1996), we finally have the sequel that’s been mooted for so long (Danny Boyle first voiced the idea back in January 2009). Back then, the original movie ended with Renton (McGregor) stealing the proceeds of a drug deal – £16,000 – from his friends, Simon aka Sick Boy (Miller), Spud (Bremner) and Begbie (Carlyle), and heading off to live a normal life. But that “normal” life, which included living in Amsterdam and being married, has fallen apart, and now Renton is back in Edinburgh. His mother has died, he’s staying with his dad (Cosmo), and looking to hook up with his old friends – if they’ll let him. He visits Spud first, only to find him trying to asphyxiate himself with a plastic bag. Saving an initially ungrateful Spud, Renton learns that Begbie is in jail serving a twenty-five year sentence, Simon is the landlord of a rundown pub that an aunt has left him, and Spud himself is a drug addict.

Renton reconnects with Simon, but Simon holds too much enmity towards his old friend because of the money from the drug deal. Along with his business partner, Veronika (Nedyalkova), Simon offers Renton the chance to become part of a scam to acquire European development funds that Simon can use to open a “leisure” club above the pub. Renton agrees, and ropes in Spud to help design the club and oversee its construction once the funds are awarded. Meanwhile, Begbie finds a way out of prison and back home to his wife, June (Turner), and teenage son, Frank Jr (Greenan). Begbie takes his son with him when he burgles properties, but is sidetracked from his endeavours when he learns from Simon that Renton is back in Edinburgh. Begbie’s thirst for revenge is exploited by Simon, and a chance encounter at a nightclub between the AWOL gaolbird and Renton leads to a showdown above the pub, and the chance to settle old scores the hard way.

If you enjoyed Trainspotting, then T2 Trainspotting is likely to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Laced with affectionate nostalgia and perceptive notions of what it is to be middle-aged and treading water, this looked-for sequel isn’t as iconic as its predecessor – and to be fair, it was never likely to be – but it does have an erstwhile melancholy feel to it that accurately reflects the regrets of its four main characters. Like everyone else, Renton is the architect of his own downfall: drug-free but without any purpose in life, he’s come home because he’s not been able to make a go of it in Amsterdam; he’s adrift in his own life, and lacking ambition. Conversely, Simon has nothing but ambition, a drive to better himself financially, but he lacks foresight and cohesive thinking; his plans always backfire as a result. Spud is an addict who wants to swap his drug habit for something more meaningful, another addiction preferably, but one that has a positive effect on his life; writing down stories from twenty years ago helps him on this path. And Begbie – well, Begbie’s only regret is that he’s only just now got out of prison.

With the characters locked in place, John Hodge’s screenplay is free to explore themes of personal responsibility, misplaced nostalgia, revenge, deceit, and compromised friendships. It looks back further than Trainspotting itself, to when all four friends were much younger, pre-teens with the whole world ahead of them, and all the promise that entailed. It provides flashbacks to the first movie, and reintroduces other characters from twenty years before, such as Renton’s girlfriend, Diane (Macdonald), now a successful solicitor. And it shows how stagnant each of the main characters’ lives have become, how mired in mediocrity they are thanks to emotional malaise and impulsive behaviour. There’s little in the way of meaningful progress for any of them, just a desire to lead brighter, better lives that is slipping away from them with every passing year.

This gloomy, regret-laden approach could have made the movie too depressing or downbeat for audiences unfamiliar with the original (which was itself a frank, unapologetic examination of the joys and horrors inherent in taking drugs), but there’s too much mordaunt humour and scabrous comedy on display, and Hodge and returning director Danny Boyle have made a movie that connects on various, different levels, and which does so with Boyle’s trademark visual stylings. This is still a movie that fizzes with invention, from its seemingly scattershot, haphazard camera angles, complex yet rewarding editing rhythms, exceptionally well chosen soundtrack, and emphatic performances, and all the way down to the integration of “old’ footage with new, including a recreation of that classic moment from the original where Renton is almost knocked down by a car – and then stops to revel in the moment.

It’s a Danny Boyle movie through and through, with several moments where the semi-linear narrative seems unlikely to knit together into a satisfying whole, until by the end, everything has been explained and the various strands all neatly tied up. And there are fitting outcomes for all the characters, with all bar one back on the road to self-respect and potential absolution. In bringing back the original cast, and at a point where their own ages reflect the passing of time more effectively than if it had been achieved through make up, the movie offers a kind of shorthand for new viewers, introducing each character they play with an economy of purpose that’s admirable and effective. McGregor still retains some of that boyish charm that made the younger Renton so attractive to watch, while Miller takes glowering to new heights, his features displaying the frustration of Simon’s life with an icy conviction. Carlyle is still effortlessly frightening as Begbie, a man who may not be as comfortable in his own skin as we thought, but who can still inject menace and venom into the most unremarkable line of dialogue.

But if there’s one performance that stands out from the rest, and unexpectedly so, it’s that of Bremner as Spud. Spud is the eternal fuck-up, the addict with the unenviable ability to still feel deeply and profoundly despite the mental numbing he endures, and Bremner is simply superb in the role. Spud is the only character that the viewer can sympathise with, as his motives are selfless, and focused (as best he can) on providing for his partner, Gail (Henderson), and son, Fergus (Fitzpatrick). There’s an innate bravery about Spud that Bremner underplays with skill, making the moment where his writing skills are acknowledged by Veronika, a touching and heartfelt one. Through Veronika’s eyes we see Spud as more than just an addict, and unlike his friends, he can be cheered on with affectionate glee. But friendship is still the key ingredient in what makes these four people tick, even if they’re at odds with each other over past indiscretions. And some bonds, however stretched or damaged they may have become, will, as the movie tells us, withstand much more besides, and still prove beneficial to everyone concerned, no matter how much life has battered them.

Rating: 8/10 – an invigorating if pensive look at middle-aged bitterness wrapped up in a blanket of repentance, T2 Trainspotting doesn’t match the heights of its predecessor, but in fairness, it never actually tries; as much a product of its time as the first movie, there’s a heartache about this movie that is genuinely affecting, and which allows new viewers to see Renton et al as far more than cyphers in a movie about trying not to let the past inform and dictate the future.

Chris Washington (Kaluuya) is a young, gifted photographer whose work is beginning to be noticed. He’s also black and in a relationship with Rose Armitage (Williams), who is white. Invited by her parents to come stay for the weekend, Chris is anxious about meeting them, fearing they might be uncomfortable with their daughter dating a black man. But Rose reassures him, and tells him that her parents haven’t a racist bone in either of their bodies, and if he could have, her father would have voted a third time for Barack Obama. They set off, but along the way their car collides with a deer, causing some damage but not enough to stop them from reaching Rose’s parents’ home. Once there, her parents – Missy (Keener) and Dean (Whitford) – greet them both warmly, but Chris is perplexed by the odd behaviour exhibited by the Armitages’ housekeeper and gardener, Georgina (Gabriel) and Walter (Henderson), who are both black.

Later that evening Chris meets Rose’s brother, Jeremy (Jones), whose behaviour is provocative and aggressive. He also continues to observe Georgina and Walter behaving strangely. When Missy persuades Chris into sitting with her, he finds that she’s hypnotising him, and he ends up in the Sunken Place, a limbo he can’t return from. At least, that’s what he believes, as he wakes the next morning, confused about what’s happened to him but finding his smoking habit is now cured. He also finds his mobile phone has been somehow disconnected from its charger. At an annual get together that the Armitages hold for their friends, Chris is surprised to see another black man arrive with a much older white woman. But the black man behaves just as oddly as Georgina and Walter, even going so far as to grab Chris and yell at him to “get out”. Chris voices his suspicions that there is something sinister going on, and Rose agrees to leave with him. But when Chris discovers evidence that makes him scared for his life, leaving proves to be far more difficult than he could have ever imagined.

Ever since its debut at the Sundance Festival back in January this year, Get Out has attracted a lot of attention for being a horror movie that takes a satirical look at contemporary racial attitudes in the good ole US of A. The movie certainly paints a satirical portrait of white liberal hubris that’s hard to ignore, but its basic premise – once it’s revealed – plants the movie firmly in paranoid thriller territory. So while there are some standard horror tropes on display, they take a firm backseat to the mystery that is carefully developed by first-time writer/director Jordan Peele, and which proves far more satisfying for its Twilight Zone stylings than for any horror trappings Get Out may be trying to appropriate.

This isn’t to say that the movie is unsure of just what kind of a movie it wants to be, far from it. It’s just that appearances can be deceiving, and Peele instills his tale of racial profiling and assimilation with so many genuinely unsettling moments that mistaking Get Out for a horror movie is only natural – and that’s without its ultra-violent, cathartic final fifteen minutes. But in terms of Peele’s acidulous look at the state of racism in modern day America, the movie is on much firmer ground. Chris’s fear that Rose’s parents won’t approve of him reflects the lingering sense of outrage over miscegenation that still resonates within the US. Despite all the advances made since the Civil Rights movement in the Sixties, Peele is saying these attitudes still prevail, subconsciously perhaps, but then that’s the point: they’ve never really gone away, and they never will. Whisper it if you must, but racism is endemic to the American psyche.

That’s a pretty blatant way of putting it, but Peele is much more subtle than that, and finds various clever ways of getting his message across. This allows the movie to flesh out its subplots – notions surrounding the nuclear family, self-determinism, and social acceptance – unencumbered by the need to be forthright or didactic. Peele is confident enough in his central narrative that he can give these subplots their due, while also playing around – successfully – with the movie’s tone. It starts off as a relationship drama, slightly anecdotal, but set up in such a way that Rose’s parents seem like just another liberal white couple with awkward yet good intentions. The introduction of Walter and Georgina and their odd behaviour allows the thriller elements to begin to take centre stage, and Peele handles the growing uncertainty of what’s really happening with a sureness of touch that’s surprising in someone making this kind of movie for the first time.

Following on, the movie descends into paranoid conspiracy territory, with Chris’s fears amplified by each successive clue he discovers, and with each one serving to reinforce his paranoia. And then we’re in full-on horror mode, as Peele pulls out all the stops to give the viewer a rousing, blood-soaked resolution. Peele displays complete control over the material, keeping each tonal shift feeling organic and unforced. And he keeps the irony spread throughout the movie, allowing it to show itself and act as a counterpoint to the serious nature of the overall material. But Peele’s comedic background won’t be denied either, and there are times when the movie is flat out funny. This is largely due to the inclusion of Chris’s friend Rod (Howery), a Transport Security Administration (TSA) officer who acts as the movie’s comic relief. Again, it’s a measure of Peele’s confidence in his material that he unites these disparate elements and makes them mesh together to such good effect.

But while there is much to recommend Get Out, Peele does drop the ball at times, with some scenes feeling unnecessary or out-of-place – the car-deer collision and its racist cop aftermath, a telephone conversation between Rose and Rod – and his command of the camera (one of this movie’s key strengths) failing him at key moments. But these don’t harm the movie insomuch as they draw attention to themselves when they occur, making for a handful of jarring moments that crop up here and there. At all other times, Peele and his crew, including DoP Toby Oliver, editor Gregory Plotkin, and production designer Rusty Smith, combine to make Get Out one of the boldest and most assured first feature’s for some time.

Peele is aided immeasurably too by his talented cast, with the UK’s Kaluuya giving a measured, yet nervy performance, perfectly displaying the disquiet Chris experiences and the misgivings Chris feels during his visit. As Rose, Williams is all sunny smiles and reassuring glances, though her character also possesses a wicked sense of humour. Keener and Whitford bring an understated menace to proceedings, but Jones is once more on barely restrained psycho duties, leaving Henderson and Gabriel to add real unease to their portrayals. And then there’s Howery, stealing the movie with a succession of one-liners, all of which lead up to a bona fide final line classic: “Man, I told you not to go in that house.”

Rating: 8/10 – a multi-faceted racial drama/horror/mystery hybrid with satirical overtones (and undertones as well), Get Out is one of the more polished and convincing thrillers you’re likely to see in 2017; well thought out, constructed and delivered, its writer/director deserves all the praise that’s been coming his way, and if he wants to give up his comedy day job and make more movies like this one, then that will be absolutely fine.

The second movie this year from Pixar (after Cars 3), Coco sees the creators of the Toy Story series make what is arguably their first fantasy movie, as twelve year old Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez) finds himself embroiled in a long-standing family mystery surrounding a ban on music. Miguel’s quest to solve this mystery, and how it connects to his musical idol Ernesto de la Cruz (Benjamin Bratt), leads Miguel into the fabled Land of the Dead. The trailer makes it clear that music is integral to the story in Coco, and the TV footage of de la Cruz is reminiscent of the newsreel footage from Up (2009), but once again it’s the quality of the animation that captures the attention: the end reveal is breathtaking. Pixar appear to have weathered the initial controversy surrounding their decision to try and trademark the term “Día de los Muertos”, and in doing so, have created a Pixar movie first: Miguel is their first central character of ethnic origin. In a way this could be a movie to savour, as it’s the last original story idea we’ll see from Pixar until March 2020. But if the story is locked in, then this could be the kind of uplifting, emotionally resonant tale that Pixar does so well when it’s not concentrating too much on banging out lacklustre sequels to existing favourites.

Edgar Wright may be the only director to turn down a gig at Marvel (he walked away from Ant-Man (2015) citing creative differences), but the downside of that decision for movie fans was his distinctive directing style being absent from our screens for four loooong years. But now he’s back, and with baby-faced Ansel Elgort as, well, the Baby Driver of the title. An action/crime/thriller about a getaway driver (yes, Elgort) looking to “retire” after meeting the girl of his dreams (Lily Collins), but reeled in for one last job by über-crime lord Kevin Spacey, the movie is replete with Wright’s trademark visual stylings (no static angles allowed here), and offbeat sense of humour (the Halloween argument). Anyone familiar with the video for Mint Royale’s Blue Song will already know how Baby Driver begins, but those who don’t will be in for a treat nevertheless. The trailer features some very impressive stunt driving, a great supporting cast that includes the likes of Jamie Foxx and Jon Hamm, and appropriately for a movie where the title character drives to the sounds of his own personal soundtrack, some really great tunes.

Aardman Studios are gloriously unique. They’re the only animation company who work with stop-motion clay animation techniques, and they regularly make crowd-pleasing movies that thrive on their own unique form of invention and wit. And if the teaser trailer for Early Man is anything to go by, then they’re onto another winner here as well. Even though we won’t see the finished product until January 2018, there’s already enough here to vouchsafe its tale of Dug (voiced by Eddie Redmayne) and his efforts to unite his tribe against rivals from the Bronze Age (yes, time travel is involved) in a confrontation that pre-dates European football by thousands and thousands of years. Dug is a classic Aardman creation, and will no doubt prove popular, but if one character is likely to stand out from all the rest, it has to be Dug’s trusty sidekick, Hognob the (early) pig. With this being Nick Park’s first solo venture as a director, and like Pixar’s Coco, Aardman’s last original story idea for some time to come, this is definitely one to look forward to (and hopefully treasure).

When Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk went into production back in April 2015, there was much talk about Ang Lee’s decision to shoot the movie at a projection frame rate of 120fps in 3D and at 4K resolution. The previous highest frame rate was 48fps for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012), but that experience didn’t prove as successful as hoped for. Lee’s idea was to make the movie as immersive as possible, and shooting at 120fps would have achieved the visual effect he was looking for. It’s a measure of Lee’s standing that his idea was supported by the various production companies who put up the money for the movie to be made. Lee’s idea was revolutionary, but also meant that there would only six cinemas worldwide that would be able to show it as Lee intended. So – artistic idealism or financial folly?

In the end, and inevitably, it’s a bit of both. Lee has taken the novel by Ben Fountain and given it the kind of loving attention to detail that is rare in mainstream movie making these days, but in doing so, has somehow managed to lose focus on the “bigger” picture. It’s a valiant effort, and one that deserves greater attention, but the movie itself proves too wayward in its execution for any distinct meaning to be attributed to the title character’s feelings about the public’s perception of him as a hero. Billy (Alwyn) is meant to be torn between two options: following the advice of his sister, Kathryn (Stewart), and leaving the army after an appearance at a Dallas Cowboys Thanksgiving home game, or returning to Iraq for another tour of duty (which is what his squad is supposed to be doing).

Billy and the rest of his squad, led by Sergeant Dime (Hedlund), are on the last leg of a nationwide victory tour. The group of soldiers, misnamed Bravo Squad by the media, are there because Billy was caught on camera in heroic fashion as he tried to save another wounded sergeant, Virgil “Shroom” Breem (Diesel), during a firefight. Back home for the tour, Billy has had time to visit his home, where his sister Kathryn has voiced her fears for his continued safety, and her worries that he’s suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Billy is undecided, unsure if he should commit to his sister’s proposal, or reaffirm his commitment to his squad. Making a decision is made more difficult both by the attention he’s getting, and the lack of understanding from the public. Nobody seems to be able to grasp what it’s like fighting in a war, and when he tries to explain how it is, he’s either unable to express himself clearly enough, or the other person doesn’t want to hear it.

This is the crux of the matter, and the script – by Jean-Christophe Castelli – spends an awful lot of time examining this aspect of what it’s like to be a soldier. At one point, the squad are approached by a businessman (Nelson) who tries to flatter them into endorsing his fracking operation, but his obvious lack of empathy leads to an overly sarcastic response from Sgt Dime that highlights the distance between them. It’s the kind of well-rehearsed comeback that happens only in the movies, but along with a shorter retort made by Billy in response to Dallas Cowboys’ owner Norm Oglesby’s (Martin) understanding of Billy’s public status, it does make clear just how distant a soldier’s experience is from what the public supposes; and how difficult it is for each side to meet in the middle. Billy connects with one of the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, Faison (Leigh), and tells her “It’s sort of weird, being honored for the worst day of your life”. She’s sympathetic, but doesn’t really understand what he’s telling her.

Around all this, the movie explores notions of fate, camaraderie, personal philosophies, determinism, what it means to be a hero, and the broader effects of violence, and the script and the movie are on firmer ground when these are being examined. There are moments where PTSD is shown to be a problem for some of the squad, particularly when a disrespectful Dallas Cowboy fan is choked into unconsciousness. And during flashbacks, Sgt Breem makes it clear to Lynn that there’s no point worrying about being killed; as he puts it, if that’s the way Billy is destined to die then “the bullet’s already been fired”. Breem’s philosophical bent makes sense to Billy, and he does his best to embrace his sergeant’s more thoughtful approach to the war and being a soldier. But he’s also firmly behind the assault on the fan, deeming the inappropriate use of force as acceptable. These contradictions add to the dichotomy inherent in Billy’s thinking, and provide a better understanding of why he’s so torn between leaving and staying. They’re also a much better way of explaining why there will always be a distance between the soldiers and the public.

Billy’s relationships with Kathryn and Faison act as a counterpoint to the macho solidarity he has with the rest of the squad, but they don’t occupy enough screen time to make as much of an impact as may have been intended. Along with movie producer Albert Brown (Tucker), there trying to clinch a deal for a movie version of the squad’s endeavours in Iraq, Dallas Cowboys gofer, Josh (Platt), and his boss, Norm, there are few other characters who are given much prominence. Fortunately, Billy’s story is absorbing enough to compensate for all this, and newcomer Alwyn proves to be a great choice in the role, having got the part just two days after leaving drama school. His ability to express the doubts and fears and troubled feelings of the character are exemplary, and it’s a performance of remarkable maturity for someone who at the time of shooting was only twenty-four (also, his American accent was so convincing, that at first Steve Martin didn’t even realise he was British).

Alwyn is given a lot of room by Lee to explore Billy’s relationship with his comrades and his return to life back home, and this freedom pays off extremely well, with Billy becoming a fully rounded character who’s entirely sympathetic thanks to the dilemma he has to face. Elsewhere, Hedlund is on equally good form as the acerbic, straight-talking Dime, Stewart looks unfortunately as if Kathryn has a drug problem, Martin is unctuous and insincere as Oglesby, Leigh is refreshing as a cheerleader with Christian beliefs, and Diesel shows that there’s far more to his acting abilities than driving muscle cars and propping up other, unsuccessful franchises.

With the performances offsetting some of the more troublesome aspects of the script, Lee’s decision to shoot the movie at 120fps does pay off, even in lower frame rate versions. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is possibly the most beautiful, most visually arresting movie of 2016. Images are crystal clear and possessed of a sharpness and depth that is amazing to watch, so much so that when Lee opts for a close-up (cue shots of Martin and Tucker late on in the movie) it’s a little unnerving; it’s as if the actors are really “in your face”. Lee’s aim to make the movie as immersive as possible has been achieved with no small amount of style and panache, and as a gamble it’s paid off far more effectively than with The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. He’s also chosen one of the best cinematographers working today, John Toll, to help make the movie so astounding to watch. It’s a shame then that the material on screen doesn’t quite match up to the efforts made off screen.

Rating: 7/10 – with its muddled exploration of the soldier’s lot, and a lack of clarity in terms of explaining said lot to a wider public (namely the audience), Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk doesn’t quite manage to reach the heights it was aiming for; technically superb but not as gripping or insightful as it could have been, it’s still a movie that has plenty of things to recommend it, though expectations should be reined in ahead of seeing it.

At the beginning of Miss Sloane, the title character (Chastain) looks directly into camera and says the following: “Lobbying is about foresight. About anticipating your opponent’s moves and devising counter measures. The winner plots one step ahead of the opposition. And plays her trump card just after they play theirs. It’s about making sure you surprise them. And they don’t surprise you.” Chastain delivers this short speech with complete conviction and due gravitas. And in doing so, the movie puts the audience on notice: what follows may not be as true or as real as you believe.

The movie follows lobbyist Elizabeth Sloane into a senate hearing where she’s accused of authorising expenses for the Indonesian government, something which is illegal for a lobbyist to do. At first she refuses to answer the questions she’s asked, hiding behind her lawyer’s brief to “plead the Fifth”. But a more personal line of questioning leads to her abandoning this line of defence and taking the fight to the hearing. Afterwards, her lawyer (Barnes) keeps repeating “five years”, the term of imprisonment she’ll receive if she’s found guilty of perjury. But Elizabeth appears unperturbed.

The movie then travels back to roughly seven months before. Elizabeth is working for a law firm owned by George Dupont (Waterston). A representative of the National Rifle Association, Bob Sanford (Shamata), asks for her help in connecting with a broader female demographic ahead of an upcoming vote on a bill that would mean mandatory background checks on anyone looking to purchase a gun. The NRA sees it as an infringement on civil liberties, and wants to make sure that the bill, the Heaton-Harris Amendment, isn’t passed. Elizabeth laughs in Sanford’s face, and refuses to have anything to do with it. Later, Dupont makes it clear that if she doesn’t work on the NRA’s initiative then her position won’t be as assured as she thinks. That night she meets Rodolfo Schmidt (Strong), head of the law firm Peterson Wyatt, and the man in charge of the fight to get the Heaton-Harris Amendment passed. The next day, Elizabeth resigns, and takes several of her team with her to Peterson Wyatt, though one of her best colleagues, Jane Molloy (Pill), chooses to stay.

In order for the Amendment to have a chance of being successful, Elizabeth, her team, and the staff at Peterson Wyatt, including Esme Manucharian (Mbatha-Raw), have to persuade sixteen out of twenty-one uncommitted senators to vote their way. As they set about this seemingly huge task – Dupont and the NRA only need to persuade six – Elizabeth plays out various strategies in her efforts to secure the necessary votes. But it soon becomes obvious that she’ll cross almost any line in order to win, even if it means sacrificing colleagues or lying to them deliberately. With the tide turning in her favour, and Dupont becoming ever more determined to derail her progress, her old firm launches a smear campaign, one that leads to Elizabeth’s sitting before a senate hearing committee and having to answer for her actions.

From the off, Miss Sloane is a thriller that throws the viewer deep into the mire of political lobbying, and which expects them to keep up with everything that’s going on. It’s an intellectual minefield, with so many issues dependent on the appropriate (or inappropriate) use of legal and ethical considerations, that looking away for even a moment could mean the difference between knowing exactly what’s going on – difficult enough thanks to Jonathan Perera’s dauntingly detailed script – and what might be going on. If you’re ever unsure as to what is happening, and/or why, then it’s best to bear in mind that opening speech, and the lobbyist always being “one step ahead”. Do that, and most of the movie will make sense… eventually.

By preferring (or needing) to stay one step ahead at all times, Elizabeth inevitably becomes a character that the viewer can’t trust. But we can have faith in her, in her need to win, and her commitment to never being out-thought, outfoxed, or outmanoeuvred. For all her manipulations and outright deceptions, Elizabeth is consistent in her efforts to be the winner, and she makes no bones about her methods: if they get the win then that’s all that matters. Along the way this means there are some casualties, notably Mbatha-Raw’s Esme, who has a personal secret exposed in front of millions of TV viewers. Elizabeth would argue that the end justifies the means, but as she is drawn deeper and deeper into the fight to get the Amendment passed, she begins to learn that some lines, once crossed, can’t be re-crossed. And as the stakes are increased, and the senate hearing hoves into view, Elizabeth has no option but to reassess her approach to lobbying and the people she works with.

Bringing the character of Elizabeth Sloane to mesmerising life, Chastain gives, arguably, her best performance since Zero Dark Thirty (2012). Cool, controlling, yet undeniably complex in both her motivations and her need to win at all costs, Chastain portrays Elizabeth as a restless, rest-avoiding predator, always looking for the weak link in an opponent’s armour, and always ready to exploit that weak link. She’ll even use her own people if she feels it’s necessary, but she’s up front about it, and it’s this straight-shooting, unapologetic persona that Chastain exploits so well, making her unlikeable and yet still strangely admirable at the same time. Chastain is the star of the movie, unforgettable whether she’s trampling on other people’s feelings or struggling to contain her own. She’s not alone, though. As her “boss” (a term you soon feel is inadequate in describing anyone who employs her), Strong goes from marvelling at her successes to feeling increasingly worried that she’s going too far with her own, hidden agenda. As the cruelly exposed Esme, Mbatha-Raw is a perfect foil for Chastain’s ebullient performance, her wide-eyed naïvete and quiet strength making her the movie’s most sympathetic character. And there’s further impressive support from Stuhlbarg as Elizabeth’s main adversary at Dupont, Lithgow as the head of the senate committee, and Barnes as her exasperated lawyer.

Orchestrating all this is Madden, now free from depicting events at the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and displaying all the skills and directorial touches needed to shepherd Perera’s screenplay (a top five Black List script from 2015) through its varied twists and turns. Make no mistake, this is an intelligent, penetrating look at a world few of us have any conception of, and which is paced like a thriller, all of which makes Miss Sloane a much more compelling movie than expected. It’s also put together very skilfully by editor Alexander Berner, and he and Madden ensure that the many scenes that are taken up by immense amounts of exposition are as equally vital as those scenes where Elizabeth’s plans are achieving momentum, or are already in full swing. In the end, it’s a tale about personal redemption set against a dark backdrop of corruption and ethical malaise, and thanks to Chastain, is nothing less than exhilarating.

Rating: 8/10 – marred only by its predictable denouement, some by-the-numbers villainy from Dupont, and Elizabeth’s not-quite-credible overall gamble, Miss Sloane is still a political thriller with teeth, and replete with flashes of dark humour that leaven the serious tone; irresistible once it’s in full flow, this has unfortunately been overlooked by audiences – which is a shame given the pedigree of the cast, the skill of its director, and the sharpness of its script.

In a world where animals inhabit human roles, Buster Moon (McConaughey) is a koala whose love of show business has led him to owning his own theatre. But his recent productions have failed to make any money, and Buster is in debt to pretty much everyone, including his own stage crew, and the bank, in the form of llama Judith (Perlman). Needing to come up with a successful idea, Buster decides to hold a singing contest with a $1000 prize for the winner. But his secretary, Miss Crawly (Jennings), accidentally adds two extra zeros to the flier he plans to distribute across the city, and when they find their way into the hands of the public, the prize money reads $100,000. The next day, there’s a massive queue outside Moon’s theatre, all ready to audition for the contest.

Amongst the hundreds of contenders, there’s arrogant blowhard Mike (MacFarlane), a white mouse with the heart and voice of a crooner; long-suffering Rosita (Witherspoon), a pig whose dreams of becoming a singer were sidetracked when she married and had twenty-five piglets; conflicted Johnny (Egerton), a teenage gorilla who wants to avoid following in his father’s criminal footsteps; wildly extroverted Gunter (Kroll), another pig who is teamed up with Rosita; aspiring lead guitarist Ash (Johansson), a porcupine whose musical tastes run to alternative rock; and reluctant Meena (Kelly), an elephant whose shyness stops her from performing. All bar Meena are chosen by Buster to take part in the contest, and rehearsals begin in anticipation of a fantastic night for all of them.

Away from the contest, all of them face personal problems that threaten their involvement in the show. As they each juggle these problems, Buster tries to find the $100,000 he needs, and targets Nana Noodleman (Saunders), a former star who performed at Buster’s theatre. The grandmother of his best friend, sheep Eddie (O”Reilly), at first she refuses to help, but agrees to see a one-off performance by all the acts. But disaster strikes thanks to Mike’s crooked fleecing of three bears in a card game. Their interruption of the show leads to the contest having to be cancelled. Buster hides himself away at Eddie’s place, but the contestants aren’t about to give up on their dreams, and they badger him to carry on. Buster refuses, until that is, he hears a certain elephant singing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.

A bright and breezy musical comedy with a great deal of heart, Sing is as much a feelgood musical as La La Land(2016), and maybe more so. It’s a genuinely heartfelt, uplifting experience that takes its generic “let’s put on a show” narrative and populates it with a winning collection of anthropomorphic animals, all of whom are likeable, endearing and fun to watch. The brainchild of writer and co-director Garth Jennings (who is also a hoot as Miss Crawly, an iguana who keeps losing her glass eye), the movie doesn’t offer anything new in terms of the overall material – you can pretty much predict the solution/outcome of each character’s problems from the word go – but what it does offer is a selection of musical performances that are well-staged and wonderfully rendered by Illumination Entertainment’s animation wizards.

Sing is a bright, sometimes gaudy, colourful movie that revels in its feelgood vibe, from Buster’s ebullient never-say-die attitude, to Gunter’s carefree, self-confidence, and Mike’s insistence on being the inevitable contest winner. Even the travails of the other characters are overcome by positive, ingenious thinking, with Rosita creating a husband and children management system out of weights and pulleys, and Ash relying on her songwriting skills to offset her sadness at being replaced so readily. Only Johnny’s story contains any potential upset, as his father’s refusal to accept his son’s dream of being a singer leads to an estrangement between them, especially when Johnny puts the preview show for Nana ahead of being the getaway driver for his father’s latest robbery.

Of course, the story is about people following their dreams, and achieving them despite the obstacles in their way. It’s not exactly groundbreaking, but then it doesn’t have to be. What’s important is that the characters, and the audience, are having a good time, and on this level, Sing is entirely successful, its vibrant, crowd-pleasing musical performances boasting great song choices, great interpretations (MacFarlane’s version of My Way is particularly good), and great visual representations (Rosita and Gunter’s version of Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off). On and off the stage, there’s a great selection of songs on the soundtrack, and there’s not one dud amongst them.

This being an Illumination Entertainment movie, there’s plenty of jokes, gags and visual humour, from Miss Crawly (just by herself), to Gunter’s avowal of “piggy power”, Johnny’s father’s gang wearing bunny masks on their robberies, and what happens when Rosita’s “home care system” eventually malfunctions. Only in an animated movie could you see such invention, and such comic anarchy, and only in an animated movie would it all make such wonderful, physics-defying sense. Perhaps inevitably though, there are a few maudlin moments, but there are only a few, and it’s perhaps to be expected that the script has seen fit to include them. The thing to remember is that for every sentimental moment, there’s at least five gags to compensate for it.

As is now the standard with Illumination, the animation is exemplary, with the characters’ mannerisms and foibles beautifully expressed, and Jennings is particularly adept at balancing their various storylines and subplots so that no one is reduced to a supporting role. Buster may be the ostensible lead, but the script is more than capable of focusing on each contestant without reducing the others’ screen time. Jennings has also assembled a great cast, with the likes of Johansson and Egerton proving that they’re just as good at singing as they are at acting. As Eddie the sheep, O’Reilly is a great foil for McConaughey’s chipper impresario, while Saunders delivers a sharply withering turn as the great Nana Noodleman. And for fans of innovation in animation, look out for the time-lapse photography that occurs near the end of the movie, and which is as breathtaking in its audacity as it is in its execution.

Rating: 8/10 – another critical and financial success for Illumination, Sing is a gorgeous, freewheeling exercise in the power of dreams, and features a wonderful variety of exciting musical performances; top-notch entertainment that extends the company’s run of success at the box office, this is just the kind of movie to chase away any negative feelings, and provide its audience with a thoroughly good time.

Seok-woo (Gong) is a workaholic whose marriage has ended in divorce, and who neglects to spend time with his young daughter, Soo-an (Kim). When she insists he goes with her to Busan to visit her mother, he feels guilty enough to do it. They board the train in Seoul, but just before it departs a young woman gets on who proceeds to have convulsions. One of the train attendants goes to help her, but she’s attacked by the woman, and within moments both have become zombies. The pair attack the rest of the passengers in that section of the train. Seok-woo grabs his daughter, and heads as far down the train as he can, while behind them, more and more passengers become victims. Only the fact that the zombies seem unable to work out how to open the doors between compartments keeps the remaining unharmed travellers from suffering the same fate.

As the train journey continues it soon becomes clear that the zombie outbreak is spreading throughout South Korea. The train eventually stops at Daejeon, which appears deserted. But once they’ve got off the train, the passengers discover that they’re not as safe as they thought. Back on the train, they find themselves separated by several zombie infested compartments. One group, including Seok-woo, fight their way through to the other passengers, only to find the others – under the direction of paranoid businessman Yon-suk (Kim Eui-sung) – barring them from entering the safety of their compartment. When they finally do get in, they’re forced to quarantine themselves in another section. And then the zombies get in as well…

A major success in South Korea (being the first movie from there in 2016 to be seen by over ten million viewers), Train to Busan takes its zombie cues from movies such as 28 Days Later… (2002) and World War Z (2013). Here the afflicted are fast, rapacious, and all kitted out with special contact lenses. The difference between these and any other zombie is their inability to notice any of the living if the living don’t move, or if they’re all in the dark (Seok-woo and co’s efforts to unite with the other passengers relies on the train travelling through several tunnels). There’s a clear sense of peril as the train embarks on its journey, and director Yeon and writer Park Joo-suk do their utmost to ramp up the tension, killing off the cast with a determined frequency, until only a handful are left (though you’ll probably be able to guess just who quite early on).

There are attempts at underscoring it all with a degree of social commentary, but unless you’re familiar with South Korean life, much of it will pass you by. That said, what will be more comforting is the number of stereotypes on display in terms of the characters, from Ma’s tough-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside father-to-be, to Kim Eui-sung’s self-serving, Machiavellian businessman. The movie wastes no time on fleshing them out as characters, and instead, focuses on the action, which includes a spectacular train wreck, and several gripping on-board encounters between the unaffected and the (dis)affected. The cast, particularly Jung as Ma’s pregnant wife, and Gong, play their parts with conviction, and the entire mise en scene is given an eerie verisimilitude thanks to Lee Hyung-doek’s crisp, strangely homogensied cinematography.

Rating: 7/10 – an above average entry in the zombie sub-genre of horror movies, Train to Busan has lots of neat directorial flourishes, and isn’t afraid to acknowledge its influences (especially in the final scene); refreshingly direct, and making good use of its largely claustrophobic settings, the movie is solidly made and definitely worth spending two hours in its company.

A portmanteau of four stories wrapped up in an interstitial animated tale, XX opens with Vuckovic’s The Box, in which a young boy, Danny (DaCunha), is allowed a peek inside the box a man on the subway says is a present, and thereafter refuses to eat. His parents (Brown, Watton) think it’s all just a phase, but then his sister starts refusing to eat as well, followed by the father. Come Xmas and all three are wasting away, but seem happy and resigned about it. Soon, the mother is riding the subway in the hope of finding the man with the box, and learning what was inside it. In Clark’s The Birthday Party, a mother (Lynskey) trying to organise her young daughter’s birthday party finds an obstacle to everything going well in the form of her recently dead husband. She tries to hide the body, but interruptions and other problems get in the way until she comes up with an ingenious, but risky, solution – if only no one looks too closely at the giant panda.

The third tale, Benjamin’s Don’t Fall, sees two couples on a trip to the desert. They find an ancient cave painting that depicts a demon. Later that night, one of them, Gretchen (Wool), is attacked. She turns into a murderous creature, and tries to kill her friends. In the final story, Kusama’s Her Only Living Son, Cora (Kirk) is a single mother who wants nothing to do with the father of her only son, Andy (Allen). But as he approaches eighteen, she begins to find that he’s not exactly the child she thinks he is, and that there are dark forces surrounding him, forces that have an agenda for him that she has either suppressed, or is completely unaware of.

XX is being promoted heavily thanks to its four female directors – five if you count Sofia Carrillo’s animated contributions – but it’s an approach that should have been avoided, because what may have sounded like a good gimmick in the planning stages, soon wears out any promise it held by the end of the first story. Now, that’s not to say that the four women behind the camera aren’t necessarily up to the challenge, it’s just that they’re unable to overcome the limitations inherent in the movie’s format. With each tale running under twenty minutes, they’re over before they’ve barely begun, and the resulting lack of defined characters, predictable storylines, hurried plot developments, and quickly applied scares/gory moments means that there’s very little substance with which to engage the audience.

Benjamin’s tale suffers the most, having four characters that we never get a chance to even halfway care about before they’re being killed off. Elsewhere, credulity is stretched to breaking point by The Birthday Party‘s central conceit, and the parents in The Box not doing more to seek help for their son apart from making just one trip to the doctor’s. The various tales are also short on atmosphere, or a sense of dread, leaving each one to slip by without meeting many of the viewer’s expectations. It’s an admirable effort, but one that tumbles helplessly and expectedly into the pit of fruitless endeavours. The performances are mostly perfunctory (though Lynskey stands out from the crowd), and the look of each tale only occasionally rises above being bland and uninspired. The idea of women doing horror is a sound one, and shouldn’t be discouraged, but on this occasion, it doesn’t work as well as it could.

Rating: 4/10 – four talented directors, four underwhelming tales, one frustrating movie – XX is all this and more, an idea that needed stronger material than that shown; if there is to be an XX 2, then maybe the directors shouldn’t be the writers as well, and maybe the running time should be expanded on, allowing for a greater emphasis on characterisation, atmosphere and increasing tension.

An early contender for Most Disappointing Movie of the Year, A Cure for Wellness held so much promise that it was perhaps inevitable that it wouldn’t hold up under close scrutiny. The return to live action moviemaking of Gore Verbinski after the less-than-stellar The Lone Ranger (2013), the movie looked like it could be many different things all at once, and while that’s not usually a good sign, Verbinski’s skill as a director meant that the movie had a better than average chance of being a success. And with no other feature in 2017 looking as if it could match the movie’s style and sense of mysterious intrigue, it seemed equally inevitable that, whatever reaction it received, it was destined for cult status.

While it’s a little early to be certain if A Cure for Wellness will achieve cult status, right now one thing that can be said is that if you make it all the way through to the end, then your own status as a tenacious, determined individual is assured. Put simply, the movie has a similar effect that a stay at the mysterious wellness centre has on its patients: it slowly drains the life out of anyone watching it, and they end up a dried out husk (it’s one of the movie’s more clumsy revelations: that patients at the spa are dying from dehydration). Verbinski has attempted to make a gothic mystery, but in doing so, has forgotten that if you’re going to put people in mortal jeopardy, then the mortal jeopardy has got to be very frightening indeed, and the nature of the mystery has got to be fully explained and not rendered unintelligible thanks to its being unintelligible in the first place.

The mystery itself is quite a simple one: what’s going on at a secluded spa in the Swiss Alps? But on the back of this, Verbinski and screenwriter Justin Haythe have fashioned a tepid melodrama that twists and turns in an effort to be intriguing, but which unfortunately, is more likely to leave viewers irretrievably puzzled instead of satisfied. As the viewer slowly learns the deep, dark, terrible history of the area, and how its legacy is still being felt two hundred years later, the movie hints at even darker, more disturbing things going on behind the spa’s public façade. And to help the viewer unravel the mystery, we have DeHaan’s venal financial consultant, a man we know almost from the start to be duplicitous and corrupt. He’s our anti-hero, unsympathetic for the most part, and someone we wouldn’t want to identify with in a million years. It seems, though, that DeHaan knows this, and he doesn’t try to make the character likeable, or misunderstood, or deserving of anything other than our immediate mistrust. But that’s at the beginning; sadly though, very little of that changes as the movie wearyingly moves on.

In making DeHaan’s character, Lockhart, so unappealing, the movie lacks a central figure for the audience to care about (even when he’s strapped into a dentist’s chair with a drill about to do something horrible to him; the audience won’t be cringing because he’s the one in the chair, but because they’re imagining themselves in the chair). Lockhart is the intended fall guy, the patsy, and for long periods – and this is a movie that delights in long periods – his fate seems assured. Sent to retrieve his firm’s AWOL CEO, Pembroke (Groener), Lockhart encounters obstacle after obstacle until he’s reassured he can see his boss later that day. But a car crash leaves him with a broken leg and no immediate way of leaving the spa. And when he finally sees Pembroke, the man is initially reluctant to leave, though he does eventually agree he should return (there’s some nonsense about an imminent business merger and financial irregularities to be pinned on the CEO, but it’s all irrelevant to the main plot and serves merely as a contrived way of getting Lockhart to Switzerland).

The best laid plans rule comes into play at this point, and Pembroke is supposed to have suffered a relapse and retracted his decision. Lockhart becomes intrigued by the spa’s history – aided by a conveniently interested and knowledgeable patient, Victoria Watkins (Imrie) – and begins to piece together its tortuous past. He also becomes intrigued by the presence of Hannah (Goth), the youngest patient there by at least thirty years, and in the words of the spa’s director, Dr Volmer (Isaacs), “a special case”. Lockhart begins to suspect that Volmer is conducting clandestine experiments on the so-called patients, and that the water everyone drinks is contributing to the ill health that they’re all experiencing. As he begins to piece together the truth of what is happening, and Hannah’s role in it all, he makes another, more startling discovery, and soon finds his own life is in serious jeopardy.

There’s a lot more to the movie than the previous two paragraphs can cover, and that’s part of the problem; it tries to be so many different things, and never settles on one thing for good. As the plot unfolds, stranger and stranger things occur and are witnessed, but not with any sense that said stranger things might be meaningful, or dangerous necessarily to Lockhart’s health. There’s a scene late on where Lockhart is trapped (barring his head) in what looks like a reconstituted iron lung. He’s roughly intubated and live eels flow down into his body. If this was a normal, reality-based incident, Lockhart would die from the experience; in the aftermath however, Verbinski has DeHaan play him like he’s experiencing time dilation, or has taken one too many downers. And then, just as suddenly, he’s over it, because the movie needs a rousing climax – not that it gets it; it gets perverse body horror instead – rather than its anti-hero staring into space until he dies.

A Cure for Wellness is a movie that its creators have made inaccessible and obscure in terms of its narrative, and the tangled history of the spa and what happened on its site two hundred years before. Some viewers will manage to work out what’s going on and why, but it won’t make any difference if they’re right or wrong. Verbinski and Haythe are less concerned with making it all appear real than they are in trying to instill a palpable sense of dread into the material. But with too many scenes outstaying their welcome, or failing to advance the plot in any way, what the viewer is left with is a movie that often looks stunning – Eve Stewart’s production design deserves every superlative you can think of – but which doesn’t know when to shut up shop and say “that’s enough already”. By the time it reaches its faux-Hammer finale, the movie has lost any intensity it may have had, and Verbinski’s handling of the last ten to fifteen minutes lacks the necessary impact to make it work properly. It’s less “Oh my God!” and more “Oh my, is that the time?”

On the performance side, DeHaan enters into the spirit of things with obvious commitment (and no small amount of personal discomfort in some scenes), but even though he brings a great deal of sincerity to his role, it doesn’t help the viewer connect with Lockhart in any meaningful way, and when he does suffer at the hands of Volmer or others, there’s no emotional investment there on the viewer’s part. As the probably devious Volmer, Isaacs is a calmer presence than DeHaan, his urbane manner contrasting with DeHaan’s more aggressive portrayal, but all that is thrown away by the demands of the finale’s Gothic excesses. And as the ethereal Hannah, Goth gets to act all mysterious and coy in a performance that matches the part, but which isn’t allowed to develop beyond Hannah’s being a very curious damsel in distress. All three make the movie more palatable thanks to their involvement, but ultimately all three are just pawns moved about in awkward ways by Verbinski’s unconvincing approach to the material.

Rating: 5/10 – bloated and stagnant for long stretches, A Cure for Wellness looks impressive from the outside, but is fatally hollow on the inside; part psychological drama, part horror, it’s a movie whose storyline never really gels or feels organic, and which relies too heavily on its visuals to be anywhere near as effective as the thriller it’s meant to be.

1976 wasn’t exactly a great year for the movies, and 1977 seemed content to follow in its footsteps. Aside from the movies listed below (and a certain movie set in a galaxy far, far away), 1977 was a year that disappointed more than it rewarded, and the massive forward strides that had been made in the first half of the decade in terms of storytelling, directing, and acting, were beginning to seem like a distant memory. What all the movies listed below have in common is a director at the helm with a clear vision of what the movie is about, and how that message is best relayed/imparted to the audience. Across a wide range of themes and subject matters, these movies have stood the test of time over the last forty years, and like all truly impressive movies, we’ll still be talking about them in another forty years’ time.

1) Eraserhead – A movie that could qualify as the dictionary definition of bizarre (and which Variety described as “a sickening bad-taste exercise”), Eraserhead is an unsettling, disturbing surrealist masterpiece. Deftly examining contrary notions of sexual disgust and longing, Lynch’s debut feature is visually arresting, but is more notable for its sound design, an aural landscape that permeates the movie and provides an unnerving backdrop for the events occurring on screen. For many, this is the highpoint of Lynch’s career, but if one thing about it is true, it’s that it’s a movie that’s never been replicated; nor is it ever likely to be.

2) That Obscure Object of Desire – Luis Buñuel’s last movie is a romantic drama set against the backdrop of a terrorist insurgency, and is famous for his use of two actresses – Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina – in the same role. It also contains Buñuel’s trademark surrealist humour, explorations of sexual frustration, a healthy dose of cynicism, and one of Fernando Rey’s most enjoyable performances. Regarded as a masterpiece by contemporary critics, That Obscure Object of Desire sees Buñuel having fun, and rewarding his fans with possibly the most relaxed and accessible movie of his entire career.

3) Close Encounters of the Third Kind – Justly famous for its stunning Devil’s Tower-set climax, Steven Spielberg’s ode to (peaceful) alien contact is big on awe and wonder, and forty years on, still retains an emotional wallop. Richard Dreyfus is a great choice for the movie’s everyman central character, and though the movie has been re-edited twice since its original release, it’s arguable that the 1977 version is still the best cut available. With that musical motif still oddly effective after all this time, and Spielberg managing to keep everything grounded, it’s an exciting, hugely entertaining slice of science fiction and a classic of the genre.

4) Annie Hall – It was nearly called Anhedonia (the inability to experience pleasure), and could have been known as either It Had to Be Jew or Me and My Goy, but in the end, Woody Allen settled for the much simpler Annie Hall, and an Best Film Oscar winner was born. The movie that first saw Allen move away from making out and out comedies, and address more dramatic issues, it sees Allen’s Alvy “Max” Singer break the fourth wall on various occasions, and make a fashion icon (albeit briefly) out of Diane Keaton. Much like David Lynch and Eraserhead, there are those who feel that Annie Hall is Allen’s best movie… and you know what? It’s difficult to argue with them.

5) Julia – When Fred Zinnemann’s Nazi-era drama first appeared on our screens, its depiction of writer Lillian Hellman’s own pre-War experiences was quickly challenged by critics and those in the know. But though Hellman’s credibility may have been in question, what isn’t is the quality of the movie itself, from its star performances (Vanessa Redgrave, Jane Fonda) to its impressive period settings, and its fascinating storyline (even if it is largely apocryphal). A movie that’s still ripe for discussion, the controversy that surrounds it makes it all the more intriguing to watch, and it sees Zinnemann on fine form, orchestrating the material with his usual aplomb.

6) 3 Women – Robert Altman was a mercurial director, with a tremendous faith in his own abilities, but even he may have been surprised that he got 3 Women made as easily as he did. Based on a dream Altman had and which he intended to make without a formal script, the movie’s psychological examination of the titular characters and the relationships they develop was greenlit on the back of Altman’s previous work. It’s a movie that can be described in many ways: absorbing, meticulous, grandiose, ambitious, funny, and more still, making it a movie that contains a number of wonderful surprises and is as fresh now as it was in 1977.

7) The American Friend – Wim Wenders’ atmospheric neo-noir thriller, adapted from the novel Ripley’s Game by Patricia Highsmith, is at first glance, a movie that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but if you stick with it (or better still, see it a second time) then the cleverness of Wenders’ approach, along with Dennis Hopper’s accomplished performance as Tom Ripley, becomes immediately apparent. A tragic tale that is by turns gripping, stylish, and unapologetic in its nihilism, The American Friend coasts through the seedy underbelly of European criminal life with a dispassionate eye for its crueller details, and Wenders turns famous directors such as Samuel Fuller into on screen gangsters.

8) Opening Night – A movie that suffered at the hands of critics on its release, John Cassavetes’ excoriating look at a self-destructive actress (played convincingly by Gena Rowlands) is difficult, intense, emotionally exhausting, powerful, and an undeniable triumph. A movie that makes its audience think about what’s happening, and which doesn’t provide any easy answers, Opening Night sees Cassavetes at the height of his writing and directing powers.

9) Desperate Living – Welcome to Mortville, home of criminals, nudists and sexual deviants, and the evil Queen Carlotta (who else but Edith Massey?). Just from that sentence alone you’d know it was a John Waters movie, and even though there’s no Divine to increase the level of audacious trashiness (is that a phrase? It is now), this is still a terrific example of how wickedly inventive Waters could be on a tiny budget. And let’s be honest, who else could get the critics from Good Housekeeping to walk out after ten minutes?

10) The Last Wave – Amazingly, The Last Wave was never picked up for distribution in the US back in ’77, an oversight that seems absurd given the movie’s reputation since then. But Peter Weir’s elliptical, thought-provoking clash of cultures and belief systems does feature one of Richard Chamberlain’s finest performances (if not the finest), some startling imagery courtesy of DoP Russell Boyd, and a final image that can be taken either literally or figuratively – something which is left entirely to the viewer.

Dysfunctional families – where would indie movie makers be without them? A staple of indie movie making, the dysfunctional family has provided us with some great movies over the years, from The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) to Little Miss Sunshine (2006) to August: Osage County (2013). Now it’s John Krasinski’s turn to shine a light on a family for whom “normal behaviour” isn’t exactly customary practice.

Krasinski plays John Hollar, a struggling graphic artist whose self-confidence is almost exhausted. As if that wasn’t enough, his girlfriend, Rebecca (Kendrick), is expecting their baby. Feeling the pressure from both sides, things get even more stressful for him when he learns that his mother, Sally (Martindale), is in the hospital and needs an operation to remove a brain tumour. Returning to his hometown after several years away, John reconnects with his father, Don (Jenkins), and his older brother, Ron (Copley). With a few days to go before the operation, John comes face to face with the problems and issues that occupy his family members’ time. Ron is screwing up his divorce from Stacey (Dyke) by spying on her and her new partner, Reverend Dan (Groban), as well as acting inappropriately in order to spend time with his two daughters. Meanwhile, Don’s plumbing business is on the brink of going under.

Adding to John’s worries is one of his mother’s nurses, an old high school classmate called Jason (Day) who has married John’s old girlfriend Gwen (Winstead). At first, Jason is concerned that John is going to try and sleep with Gwen while he’s back. John reassures him that he won’t, and receives an invitation to dinner. But though his intentions are honourable, Gwen’s aren’t and he has to rebuff her advances. Wanting to be open and honest about the encounter, he tells Rebecca about it, but in such a clumsy way that she becomes worried and travels to his hometown to be with him. Once there, she reveals a few truths that John has been avoiding admitting, while he too reveals a truth that she has been unaware of. Meanwhile, Ron finds an unlikely supporter in Reverend Dan, Don takes a job at a wine store to bolster his business’s finances, and soon, the day of Sally’s operation is at hand.

Krasinski has said that the one-liner for The Hollars is something that we’ve heard before: a guy goes home to his family and finds out about himself. And he’s spot on. But while it’s true that it’s a theme that’s been done several times before, and that the movie doesn’t really offer us anything new in terms of characterisation or the narrative, what the movie does do is to introduce us to a new, disparate bunch of people who are all trying to deal with their own individual problems, while also trying to support each other as best they can. But that’s the basis of any movie about a dysfunctional family. The question to ask is: within its own terms and its own ambitions, does The Hollars work?

Inevitably, the answer is yes and no. There is much to recommend The Hollars, and Krasinski plays to the strengths of Jim Strouse’s screenplay at every opportunity. The characters are well-drawn, and the interaction between them is sympathetic and knowing, allowing the cast to display each character’s vulnerabilities and strengths to good effect. From Krasinski’s self-doubting, slightly adrift John to Copley’s manic, short-sighted Ron, from Jenkins’ overly emotional, self-deluding Don to Martindale’s anxious yet eternally supportive Sally, and Kendrick’s mostly confident, comforting Rebecca, the movie is populated by characters who are easily recognisable and a pleasure to spend time with. Strouse keeps the various inter-relationships on the simple side, with few complications to upset or muddy the waters. This allows the viewer to engage with them more easily, and though this also leads to a feeling of unnecessary mawkishness that develops as the movie goes on, Krasinski’s skill as a director ensures it doesn’t overwhelm the material as a whole.

Krasinski is helped by a clutch of great performances, and he exploits each member of his talented cast in justifiable fashion. Jenkins does bewildered to very good effect, making Don seem as if he’s barely in the room. Copley’s take on Ron is to mix a committed father with an ADD sufferer, and he provides a good deal of the movie’s easy humour. Kendrick tenders another slight variation on the type of character that she always plays in this kind of thing, but Rebecca is very much a supporting role whose job it is to show John the way forward when he needs it. Krasinski slips easily into the central role, and plays the gauche, somewhat perplexed John with a good deal of charm. But if anyone stands out from the ensemble cast then it’s Martindale, who once again, reaffirms her status as one of the best character actors currently working in movies. As the affable, good-natured Sally, Martindale gives a delicate, thoughtful performance that is entirely natural and heartfelt.

But while the performances are the movie’s main draw, some of the subplots fail to take hold in – perhaps – the way they were meant to. Ron’s often childish behaviour, particularly in the presence of Reverend Dan, is a little over-the-top and far from credible, even for a character who appears, for the most part, to be a man-child. And Don’s business problems, which at first seem like they’re going to have a lasting impact on the family as a whole, waste a whole scene where he’s refused credit, only for a solution to come along that fails to address the issue of depleted funds entirely. The inclusion of John’s ex-girlfriend, Gwen, has even less impact, as beyond the dinner scenes, she doesn’t reappear, leaving the viewer to wonder if she was meant to have an effect on John’s life in some way. But if that’s so, then it seems it was either left out at one of the draft stages, or on the cutting room floor. These failings help to make the movie feel uneven at times, and there’s a definite sense that more time would have been needed to address them properly.

Overall, Strouse’s screenplay and Krasinski’s direction combine to make The Hollars an enjoyable comedy with serious moments, and a poignant drama with humorous stretches. A lot of it is predictable, but that’s not a bad thing as this is one of those occasions where familiarity breeds fondness and uncomplicated indulgence instead of contempt. With a suitably indie soundtrack made up of original songs by Josh Ritter, and a winning, relaxed feel to proceedings, The Hollars provides viewers with an offbeat, captivating experience that adds up to a warm-hearted, generous good time for anyone that seeks it out.

Rating: 7/10 – genial and obliging, The Hollars doesn’t waste a second in its attempts to get you to like it, and once you do, you can forgive it when the material stumbles over itself from time to time; buoyed by a great ensemble cast, and a good sense of its own strengths and weaknesses, it tells its story succinctly and without any undue fuss – and that’s not always when there’s a dysfunctional family involved.

On paper it must have sounded like a great idea. A US/China co-production directed by Yimou Zhang and starring Matt Damon, and telling one of the legends behind the creation of the Great Wall of China: that it was built to stop a species of monster called the Tao Tei from over-running the country. On paper it promised Zhang’s visionary skill as a director, Damon’s solid acting presence, and some of the most exciting battle scenes this side of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. It would also be the most expensive movie in Chinese history, costing $135 million.

But somewhere along the way, what everyone – the production companies and the producers, Zhang and Damon, anyone else involved – forgot was that the movie was going to need a decent script. Or maybe they were aware it needed a decent script but decided to make do with the one they had (or maybe working with more than one hundred on-set translators didn’t help). However it was, The Great Wall reaches us with its goal to entertain its audience undermined almost from the word go. And it never recovers, offering lazy characterisations, even lazier motivations for its characters, plotting that goes beyond ridiculous, and the kind of moments that are meant to be, well, meaningful but just look and sound awkward. It’s only the well-mounted action sequences that provide any fun, but by the end, any credibility they’ve given the movie has run dry as well. So step forward Max Brooks, Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz who came up with the story, and Carlo Bernard, Doug Miro and Tony Gilroy who actually wrote the script. Give them all a hearty round of applause – and let that be the only acknowledgment they get for coming up with this farrago.

Now obviously, The Great Wall is a fantasy movie, and none of it ever happened for real, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be grounded as far as possible within its own fantastical world. Matt Damon and Pedro Pascal as mercenaries trying to steal black powder (gunpowder) from the Chinese? Okay, that one’s possible. The Great Wall built to stop a horde of monsters from over-running the country (and by extension, the world)? Ahh, hang on a minute. No, that’s not going to work. There are problems with that idea straight away, and these are problems the movie ignores, as if by ignoring them no one will stop and say, ahhh, hang on a minute… The problem lies with those pesky, awkward timescales, the ones the movie itself comes up with. Seventeen hundred years to build. Okay, but the Tao Tei attack every sixty years, and again according to the movie, have been doing so for two thousand years. So the obvious question is: how is it that the Tao Tei haven’t over-run the country already? There’s thousands upon thousands of the ugly creatures (which must mean their Queen is kept very busy).

To be fair, the movie does try to provide an answer to this conundrum, by mentioning that the Tao Tei are evolving with each sixty year cycle, and becoming more and more intelligent. But then it shoots itself in the foot – again – by giving Damon’s character, William, a large chunk of magnetised rock (don’t ask; really, don’t). Magnets apparently have the ability to literally put the creatures to sleep, something the Chinese are aware of but which they’ve never put to the test. Cue a mission to capture one of the creatures. Once secured, the creature is then whisked off to the capital city of Bianliang where the magnet is removed far enough for the creature to wake up and transmit its location telepathically to its Queen (oh, yes, they’re telepathic as well). And just at the same moment, the Chinese, led by Commander Lin (Jing) and Strategist Wang (Lau) discover that the Tao Tei have been digging a massive tunnel through the Wall and are heading for Bianliang (and no one has noticed this, or spotted them heading for the capital; no, really, no one).

If after all this, you’re not convinced that The Great Wall has a really duff script then you’ll really have to see it for yourself. What was probably meant to be an effective melding of Western and Eastern movie making, or at the very least a Chinese tale adapted for a wider international audience, in the end becomes a collection of cinematic clichés, desultory character beats, and an ending that’s so rushed you get the feeling that maybe you’ve missed something (one minute the tunnel is discovered, the next, everyone’s climbing onto unstable hot-air balloons to reach Bianliang before the Tao Tei get there). It’s a movie that doesn’t seem to trust itself with any depth or nuance, as if audiences wouldn’t appreciate their inclusion. In its aim to be as entertaining as possible, it appears to have shed anything that might be thought-provoking, original, or ambitious.

During the movie’s production there was a lot of criticism surrounding Damon’s casting (as if no one realised this was an international co-production). Accusations of the movie using a white saviour narrative prevailed for a long while, and on watching the movie, it’s not hard to see why such accusations were made. Whether they’re well-founded or not will be down to the individual viewer, but as the Chinese have been fending off the Tao Tei for centuries, and only defeat them once Damon’s character turns up – well, you do the math. There’s also the inevitable attraction between Damon’s early medieval archer and Jing’s initially wary (but intrigued) commander. Their relationship remains entirely platonic throughout, with admiring glances appearing here and there, but the idea of an actual romance is firmly kept in its place. This may be an international co-production made for modern audiences, but let’s not get several centuries ahead of ourselves.

In the end, this is an American production that takes an ostensibly Chinese story (it was actually dreamed up by Legendary Entertainment CEO Thomas Tull and World War Z author Max Brooks), makes it on Chinese soil with a largely Chinese cast and crew, appropriates a Chinese national monument, and then jettisons anything that makes it truly, identifiably Chinese. (There’s also a corollary with World War Z as the Tao Tei climb up and over each other in their efforts to scale the Wall.) Should the Chinese feel insulted by this? That’s a difficult one to answer, their having been involved in this almost from the beginning, but if the white saviour narrative does apply then this is arguably one of the most racially condescending movies made in a very long while.

But inevitably, with all the talent involved, there are some things that the movie gets right, it’s just that there aren’t enough of them to make up for when it goes wrong. The movie is often beautiful to look at, with a dazzling array of colours for the Chinese to wear and be seen against, and the overall production design by John Myhre is equally dazzling. The Wall’s defences are impressive too, with one unexpected, built-in feature proving particularly effective against the Tao Tei (though frustratingly it’s only used once). And one character’s death prompts a beautiful display of sky lanterns against the backdrop of the night sky. But as already mentioned, these aspects don’t make up for the clumsy, substance-free elements that are thrust centre-stage, from those awkward timescales, some truly awful dialogue, a subplot involving Dafoe’s captive mercenary and his plan to steal the black powder, and the inclusion of a young soldier who proves his bravery when everyone (except William) doubts him.

Rating: 4/10 – as dumb as dumb can be, The Great Wall is a terrible mis-step by Zhang, and by everyone else involved; big on spectacle but short on invention and lacking any internal logic, it’s a movie built out of nothing and unsurprisingly, is well on course to lose a lot of money for the studios who made it.

Winfried Conradi (Simonischek) is a retired music teacher with too much time on his hands and not enough to do. To make his life more “fun” he plays jokes on the people around him. He’s harmless though, and anyway, the people he knows are used to him and his behaviour. The only person he doesn’t see is his daughter, Ines (Hüller), who is working for a firm of business consultants in Bucharest. When she arrives home unexpectedly, Winfried gains a suspicion that Ines isn’t very happy; she pretends to be on her phone rather than socialise with her family. Following the death of his dog, Willi, Winfried decides to pay Ines a visit himself.

He waits for sometime at her company’s offices, until she sends an assistant, Anca (Bisu) to look after him until the evening, when she invites him to a reception for the CEO of a German oil company, Henneberg (Wittenborn); it’s his company that she’s hoping to secure a lucrative contract with. But Henneberg ignores her, and pays more attention to Winfried. At a club afterwards, Henneberg continues by patronising Ines and mocking Winfried. As time goes on, Ines finds having her father around too much of a distraction; the final straw is when he causes her to miss an important business meeting. Feeling unappreciated and unwanted, Winfried decides to go home.

A few days later, Ines is meeting her friends Steph (Russell) and Tatjana (Minis) at a bar when a man asks if he can share his champagne with them. It’s clearly Winfried wearing a wig and false teeth (and calling himself Toni Erdmann), but Ines says nothing, even when he claims to be a life coach. In the days that follow, Winfried appears at her work and insinuates himself into the company. Ines at first believes he’s trying to ruin her life, but strangely, he has some good ideas and she begins to take him with her when she has any meetings. He also goes with her on a company night out, but Winfried is dismayed to see that he’s been right all along, and Ines isn’t happy. To make up for this, he takes her to a Romanian family’s Easter party, where he gets her to sing Whitney Houston’s The Greatest Love of All. But this brings up conflicting feelings in Ines, and later, at a party she’s hosting at her apartment, a problem with her zip leads to a decision that will be far-reaching in more ways than one.

Justifiably nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film at this year’s Oscars, Toni Erdmann is the kind of movie that looks daunting when you first approach it – a German comedy/drama running two hours and forty-two minutes? – but which draws you in and keeps you spellbound from beginning to end. Thanks to a perceptive, well-constructed script by writer/director Ade, it’s a movie that confounds expectations and proves engaging throughout, and it does so by creating two entirely credible and relatable central characters in worn-down Ines and her aging hippy father. When we first see them together, there’s a definite distance between them: Winfried didn’t even know she was going to be visiting. And disappointed, he leaves early. But he’s seen enough to know that he has to make an effort to help his daughter.

It’s this notion, that a parent can still feel responsible for a child even when they’re an adult, is what drives the movie, and what makes it so engaging. Winfried’s idea of helping Ines may be unorthodox, weird even, but it’s also heartfelt and sincere. And he’s not put off when his trying to help her as himself doesn’t work. He adopts a different approach, and discovers that his alter ego is far more effective as a father figure than he is as an actual parent. It’s a lovely twist, and one that keeps the movie from becoming too predictable as Ines struggles to make sense of what her father is doing, and why. And Winfried’s task is made all the more difficult thanks to Ines’ work ambitions, which are being hampered by her boss, Gerald (Loibl). While she tries harder than anyone else to capture the oil company contract, she also has to deal with the casual sexism that exists in her workplace. It’s because she feels she has to put up with all this that makes Winfried’s job all the harder; he has to get her to loosen up.

Ines herself is the movie’s real focus, and she’s one of the most well-developed, and credible, female characters in recent movie memory. Ambitious and yet unsure of those ambitions, in a relationship with colleague Tim (Pütter) that meets her physical needs but not her emotional ones, and caught up in an after-work party lifestyle that makes her feel uncomfortable, Ines is brought to life by Hüller in a performance that is honest (at one point nakedly so), scrupulously authentic, and hugely impressive. When it all gets too much and her defences begin to come tumbling down, Hüller’s portrayal of Ines remains as tightly contained as it’s been throughout, but she adds emotional layers that haven’t been there, layers that provide depth and help explain just how she’s coming to terms with the changes to her life that have long been delayed.

Ines’ relationship with her father is many things: exasperating, dismaying, mortifying, but still a loving relationship, and Ade adds a coda to the movie that perfectly relates the feelings they’ve had for each other all along. In many ways it’s a brave movie, mixing comedy and drama to surprisingly good effect given the melancholy feel the movie has as a whole, and it isn’t afraid to paint either of its two main characters in a negative light. It’s also painstakingly directed by Ade, whose use of space and her placement of the characters in that space hasn’t really been given its due since the movie debuted at Cannes last year. Aided tremendously by DoP Patrick Orth and editor Heike Parplies, Ade has put together a movie that’s as visually arresting as it is intellectually and emotionally stimulating. It’s a beautifully composed movie, with imagery that lingers in the mind long after you’ve viewed it.

Beaten to the Oscar by The Salesman (2016) (no mix-up there), Toni Erdmann is an extraordinary look at the relationship between a father and a daughter that deserves all the awards it’s received, and which channels poignancy and hope through that relationship in ways that are humorous and dramatic, affecting and remarkable, and striking and challenging – and all at the same time. It’s a tremendous achievement by Ade, a movie that quietly amazes as it rewards its audience with two faultless performances, a scenario that never quite goes in the direction you think it will, and which throws in – unexpectedly – a Bulgarian kukeri for good measure. Powerful and appealing, this is a modern classic, pure and simple.

Rating: 9/10 – you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll be sad, you’ll be lifted up, but you definitely won’t be bored, as Toni Erdmann is a triumph of character building and emphatic storytelling; near flawless in its execution, the movie’s complex emotional shading and refreshing visual style combine with various other carefully applied elements to make a movie that’s both thought-provoking and entertaining.

New York City, the Sixties. Walter Stackhouse (Wilson) is a successful architect with a beautiful home and a beautiful wife, Clara (Biel). In his free time he writes short stories about crime and murder. On the outside he’s living the perfect life, but his marriage is strained. Clara has a history of mental instability, and is remote from him. At the same time, though, she’s jealous and possessive, accusing him of having an affair with a young woman, Ellie (Bennett), who attended a party they gave. When Clara is like this, Walter usually ends up in a local bar. It’s on one such occasion that he reads an article in a newspaper about the unsolved murder of a woman outside of New York at a rest stop called Harry’s Rainbow Grill.

Suspicion seems to rest on the woman’s husband, a bookstore owner called Kimmel, but he has an alibi. This isn’t enough for the detective investigating the case, Corby (Kartheiser), who is convinced Kimmel is the killer. While he tries to intimidate Kimmel into confessing, Walter becomes more and more fascinated with the murder, and like Corby, becomes convinced that Kimmel is guilty. He even goes so far to visit Kimmel at his bookstore. But at home, his marriage goes from bad to worse. Clara takes an overdose and ends up in hospital. When she comes home, her jealousy remains firmly in place, and she remains convinced that Walter is having an affair with Ellie. When she’s proved right, Walter tells her he’s going to divorce her; Clara retaliates by saying she’ll definitely kill herself if he does.

Undeterred, Walter continues with his relationship with Ellie, but when Clara leaves suddenly to visit her sick mother upstate, he follows the bus she takes until it reaches Harry’s Rainbow Grill. But though she gets off the bus, Walter doesn’t see her, and he heads back to New York City. Later, Walter receives terrible news, news that causes Corby to link him to the murder of Kimmel’s wife, his relationship with Ellie to falter, and his business partnership to founder. With his honesty and integrity on the line, as well as his freedom, Walter must find a way of extricating himself from a situation that grows worse every day, and that could ultimately cost him his life.

An adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Blunderer, A Kind of Murder is a good-looking movie in search of a leading character for the audience to identify and sympathise with. Walter’s plight should be one that has the viewer on the edge of their seat, but thanks to both the script and Wilson’s performance, he’s vanilla bland from start to finish, and the movie never really knows how to make his predicament more intriguing or exciting. Walter becomes interested in the murder of Kimmel’s wife because he’s beginning to have thoughts about killing Clara. As he believes Kimmel killed his wife, Walter is supposed to feel some kind of kinship with the bookstore owner, but it’s all psychologically unconvincing. Walter channels his feelings about Clara into his writing, something we see on more than one occasion, and so any idea that he and Kimmel are similar can be disregarded from the start.

What this leaves us with is a contrived relationship that never develops beyond an uneasy semi-alliance against Corby’s invasive and confrontational detective work. And there’s never any doubt as to whether or not Kimmel killed his wife, or if Walter’s situation will lead to his livelihood being compromised. As the movie progresses from potential whodunnit to unabashed thriller, Susan Boyd’s first-time script forgets to instil proceedings with any tension, as Walter’s predicament never sees him fully in jeopardy, or at risk of having his comfortable world taken away from him. And in conjunction with Boyd’s script, Wilson delivers what may well be one of his least successful performances ever. For an actor who can genre-hop with ease, and who at least doesn’t look out of place in a period drama, Wilson never connects with Walter and gives a wayward portrayal of a man whose calm, outward manner belies a compulsive, selfish individual hidden away on the inside.

It’s this duality that the movie tries hard to promote, with Walter and Kimmel meant to be two sides of the same coin, and Clara and Ellie both representing the best and worst of Walter’s relationships with women. But again, there’s nothing for the audience to connect with. Even when Clara spells out her intention to kill herself if Walter goes ahead with the divorce, and tells him everyone will blame him for not doing enough to help her, there’s nothing there to back up that claim. It carries the weight of an empty paper bag, and as such, loses any validity, so that when Walter receives his terrible news, it doesn’t have the impact that it should have. And this is the moment when the viewer should find themselves completely on Walter’s side… but probably won’t.

As a thriller, A Kind of Murder stumbles along trying to match Highsmith’s elegant turn of phrase to its early Sixties setting, and only doing so on very rare occasions. It also dispenses with any attempt at providing back stories for any of the characters, leaving us in a void when it comes to understanding their current motivations. Clara is clearly mentally ill, and she’s clearly difficult to live with, so why Walter stays with her is a bit of a mystery (and a better one than if Kimmel killed his wife or not). And why Corby becomes so obsessed with Kimmel and bringing him to justice isn’t explained either. In the end, these are characters operating in a vacuum, occasionally bumping into each other but failing to make a proper connection.

And so it goes for the length of the movie. Wilson’s disappointing turn is matched by Biel’s monotone performance, Kartheiser’s unncessarily angry cop, and Bennett’s subdued turn as Walter’s girlfriend. Only Eddie Marsan deserves any praise, giving the kind of unexpected, yet nuanced performance that this kind of movie needs to be anywhere near successful. His brooding, snake-like approach to Kimmel is a master-class in big screen malevolence. Tying all this together is Goddard, known mostly for his TV work, but not stretching his abilities too far in bringing this tale to the big screen. However, he’s on firmer ground with the movie’s recreation of Sixties New York, with its colourful vibrancy and Mad Men-style glamour of the period, and all despite (or in spite of) the wintry backdrop. But for anyone expecting more substance with their style, this isn’t the place to be looking for it.

Rating: 5/10 – lacklustre in too many ways to even count, A Kind of Murder flatlines for most of its running time, and forgets to make itself interesting for the viewer; with so-so performances and a dull script, this is one thriller that can be given a wide berth unless you’re a fan of Marsan’s, or in an undemanding mood when it comes to choosing something to watch.

Like this:

Way back on 1 February 2017, Poster of the Week looked at Der Januskopf (1920), a lost movie by F.W. Murnau. At the end of the post there was this:

NOTE: There’ll be more from Josef Fenneker throughout February 2017.

The idea was to show off more of Fenneker’s distinctive work, and provide some very basic information about the movies themselves. There were meant to be four such posts, but somewhere along the way, what with all the lead-up to the Oscars, and it proving suprisingly difficult to pick out just four posters, the idea got pushed back and back until February was over and done with. But a good idea is still a good idea, even if it gets delayed, and a rethought idea is even better. So instead of four movie posters to admire (or not, Fenneker is something of an acquired taste), here are eight examples of his work, all startling in their own right, and all testaments to Fenneker’s skill as a graphic artist.

Nerves (1919) / D: Robert Reinert

The Dictatorship of Love Part 2: The World Without Love (1921) / D: Fred Sauer

The Burning Soil (1922) / D: F.W. Murnau

Alcohol (1920) / D: Ewald André Dupont, Alfred Lind

Nemesis (1920) / D: Carmine Gallone

Madame de La Pommeraye’s Intrigues (1922) / D: Fritz Wendhausen

A Debt of Honour (1921) / D: Paul L. Stein

The Devil and Circe (1921) / D: Adolf Gärtner

NOTE: If you’re wondering what “Marmorhaus” (literally “marble house”) refers to, it was a cinema built in Berlin in 1912-13. It was for Marmorhaus that Fenneker designed these and over two hundred and fifty more posters.

Veronica Salt (Oh) is the trophy wife of Stanley (Young), a businessman whose company is about to make a lot of money thanks to a contract with the US government. She has a teenage son, Kip (Gioiello), who aspires to be an artist (even though she and Stanley want him to go into finance), but Veronica herself doesn’t work, though she does have a habit of drinking too much red wine. Ashley Miller (Heche) is a struggling artist whose work is regarded as too painful to look at, or be displayed in people’s homes. She has a partner, Lisa (Silverstone), who is supportive of her, and an assistant, Sally (Kavoussi), who she treats appallingly. When Lisa needs Ashley to help her out one night with her catering business, she finds herself at a party organised by Stanley to celebrate the birthday of one of his business partners.

Veronica and Ashley were at college together, but though they were friends, Veronica ended their friendship when she found out Ashley was a lesbian. With Ashley still feeling some animosity for this, an unfortunate encounter later on on a stairwell leads to a fight between the two women. Ashley is victorious, but the fight leaves Veronica in a coma. Two years pass. Veronica wakes to find that her world has changed completely while she’s been asleep. Stanley and Kip are no longer alive, and she’s flat broke. Ashley, meanwhile, has become successful, and her latest exhibition has resulted in her selling all her paintings. She and Lisa have also decided to have a baby together, with Ashley being the birth mother. Veronica is taken in by her ex-housekeeper, Donna (Taylor), and begins a job as a chambermaid at a hotel. One day she sees an art magazine that features an article on Ashley. Angry at all that she’s lost because of her fight with Ashley, she attends Ashley’s latest exhibition and damages several of the paintings before running off with one. Chased by Ashley, they have another fight, but this time it’s Ashley who ends up in a coma.

Two more years pass. Ashley wakes to find that her world has changed completely while she’s been asleep. She has lost both the baby and Lisa, and she’s flat broke. Sally, meanwhile, has become successful, and her comic book about happy bunnies has led to Hollywood snapping up the movie rights. Ashley is taken in by Sally, but she finds it difficult to draw, a side effect of the coma. With her life having lost all its meaning, Ashley is given the opportunity to find Veronica – who is now living in the countryside with her Aunt Charlie (Hill) – and settle things once and for all.

If the idea of seeing Sandra Oh and Anne Heche beat the living crap out of each other is your main reason for watching Catfight, then perhaps you shouldn’t. Although the three fights in the movie occupy a reasonable amount of screen time, they’re not what the movie is about, and they’re not as integral to the story as you might believe. In fact, writer/director Tukel could have used any one of a dozen other confrontations between Veronica and Ashley, and still got his point across. The fights themselves are heavily stylised, with both women hauling off and landing huge punches to each other’s faces in a way that isn’t the least bit realistic (they even use a hammer and a wrench on each other in the second fight), but which is at least entertaining in an “oh-my-Lord-will-you-look-at-that” kind of way. Both actresses give it their all, but the accompanying sound effects add to the dampened sense of realism that Tukel is aiming for, and as mentioned before, the fights are heavily stylised, brutal exercises in women behaving like brawling men.

The real message that Tukel is trying to get across is that happiness is intangible, here one minute, gone the next, and it’s how we deal with that loss that counts. Veronica loses everything: her family, money, her social standing, and a lot of bad habits that she encouraged in herself, such as drinking too much and not taking responsibility for it. She learns humility, and begins to work on bettering herself. She’s derailed for a moment by seeing Ashley on the cover of the art magazine, and when she goes to Ashley’s gallery, she’s doing so out of both revenge and self-pity. She wins the fight that ensues and walks away the victor because she’s exorcised the anger she felt for missing out on so much, and losing so much as well. She finds a peace within herself in the time that follows, and by living with her aunt, learns to embrace that peace in the same way that her aunt embraces nature (or Sam the tree).

For Ashley, though, it’s a different matter. While she has a strident sense of her self-worth as an artist, her lack of success has left with her with a warped sense of entitlement. Her art reflects this, with its violent images and criticisms of consumerism and the Middle Eastern war the US is engaged in. This anger sees her through the first fight, and precipitates the third, but where Veronica eventually finds a better way to live her life, Ashley is unable to. As she tells Veronica before their third showdown, “I have nothing left to do in this life but destroy you.” Ashley needs her anger; in some ways it defines who she is. For Veronica, anger is a tool, a resource that she can call on when she needs to. It’s no wonder their feud is so intense, and costs them both so much emotionally and physically.

In telling Veronica and Ashley’s stories, Tukel is on solid ground when examining the two women’s lives and what drives them, but unfortunately is less successful with the themes and subplots that accompany them. Throughout, there’s a war on, a conflict in the Middle East that Tukel uses to further examine issues of individual loss and pain, and to challenge the broader sense of entitlement that the US has in these situations. But these moments within the movie, ultimately, don’t add anything to it, and aren’t fully addressed, leaving the viewer with the sense that the movie is anti-war but can’t quite articulate why beyond the obvious. And there are awkward interludes featuring Bierko as a TV presenter whose updates on the war are meant to be ironic, but which are too facile to count.

Oh is terrific as Veronica, perfectly capturing the emotional highs and lows of her character’s journey, while Heche has the straighter arc, and one that calls for her to be largely unsympathetic throughout. Both do a fine job, and there’s able support from Silverstone as Ashley’s partner, whose paranoia surrounding gifts at a baby shower is one of the movie’s (uncomfortable) comic highlights. Tukel deftly weaves comedy and drama together in his script, but when he wants to get surreal – as when both women wake from their comas – it’s a little less effective. (He’s on even less firmer ground with Lisa’s obsession over a fake baby that she uses as a substitute for not being the birth mother.) With crisp, adroitly framed cinematography from Zoe White, and an offbeat soundtrack that features tunes played by a marching band, Catfight is a low-budget, low-key surprise, and well worth a look.

Rating: 7/10 – mildly demanding, but effective enough within the limits of its own ambitions, Catfight mixes black comedy with drama and the occasional dose of satire to create a movie that tries hard to impress, even if it doesn’t always succeed; Oh and Heche make for great rivals, and show a tremendous commitment to their fight scenes, but it’s when they’re called upon to show each character’s vulnerabilities and strengths that the movie really strikes a chord.

It’s 2029, and mutants are pretty thin on the ground, with those that remain hiding from the rest of humanity, hoping to be overlooked. They’re almost extinct thanks to a virus created by the Transigen Project, led by Dr Zander Rice (Grant). More able than most to blend in, Logan aka Wolverine (Jackman), is working as a limo driver while also looking after – secretly – Professor Charles Xavier (Stewart), now in his nineties and suffering from senile dementia. Hidden away in Mexico, Logan is helped in this by another mutant, Caliban (Merchant). Xavier’s psychic abilities are now inherently dangerous; if he has a seizure it triggers a psychic attack that could mean the death of anyone around him. In one of his more lucid moments he talks of a mutant who will need Logan’s help, but Logan doesn’t want to know anything about it.

An encounter with a woman, Gabriela (Rodriguez) and a young girl, Laura (Keen), brings Logan and the mutant Xavier has been talking about together. Laura is a mutant, but with a difference: she was created in a Transigen lab, along with twenty-two other “children”. Bred to be weapons, the creation of a twenty-fourth mutant means Laura and all the other children are expendable. Gabriela has helped Laura and the other children escape, but now they need to rendezvous at a place called Eden in North Dakota. When Transigen come a-calling at Logan’s hideout – in the form of Donald Pierce (Holbrook) and his team of genetically enhanced Reavers – previous events dictate that Logan, Xavier and Laura make a run for it, and against Logan’s better judgment, they head for North Dakota. But Caliban is captured by Pierce and coerced into using his tracking abilities to find Logan and the girl.

As the trio journey to Eden, Logan learns more about the activities of Transigen and their attempts to create mutants they can control, while Pierce comes close a couple of times to catching them. A chance encounter outside of Oklahoma City with a local family, the Munsons (LaSalle, Neal, Fouse) has unexpected consequences, as well as revealing the identity of X24, Transigen’s latest creation. Logan does eventually get Laura to Eden, which proves to be real and not the comic book-inspired destination that Logan has believed Gabriela made up. There the other children are planning to make a break for the Canadian border, and Laura plans to go with them. But Pierce, now accompanied by Dr Rice, is soon on their heels, and it will need Logan’s alter ego, the Wolverine, to ensure they reach safety instead of being captured and killed.

Fans of Logan/Wolverine have been clamouring to see the character that they’ve read and seen in the comics, brought to life in the same violent, berserker fashion that he’s portrayed on the page. A brief moment towards the end of X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) gave everyone a chance to see what that would look like, but it was just a moment, however well-received. Now, in his third solo outing, Logan’s rage has finally been given its due, and this is the ultra-violent/borderline sadistic outing that the fans have been waiting for. The tone is set right at the start, with a scene that pits Logan against a quartet of gangbangers. Blasted in the chest, he still gets up and proceeds to use his adamantium claws to slice, dice and eviscerate all four of them. But at the same time it’s clear that his healing powers aren’t as effective as they used to be, and though his trademark rage is still there, it appears that the use of his claws is as painful for him as it is for anyone on their receiving end.

It’s this vulnerable side to Logan’s character, this curtailment of his powers, that makes Logan such an interesting movie to watch. Based very loosely on the comic book series Old Man Logan (2008-09), this version of Logan, older, even more pragmatic, yet weary of life and living, allows the viewer to look beyond the usual superhero movie traits, and into the mind of a character who’s seen and done too much and doesn’t care to keep living that kind of life. He wants to die, a concept that most – if not all – other superhero movies shy away from. But returning director James Mangold, who made The Wolverine (2013), and along with screenwriters Michael Green and Scott Frank, has made a road movie-cum-Western that adds surprisingly complex emotional layers to its basic storyline, and which doesn’t tiptoe around the issues it brings up. This is an unashamedly adult “superhero” movie, dealing with adult themes in an intelligent, adult way, and at no point does it short change the viewer by glossing over the emotional stakes set up within the narrative.

It’s the Wolverine movie that Hugh Jackman has been waiting to make since his first appearance in the role back in 2000. Still aloof, but weighed down by experiences we can only guess at, Logan is battered and scarred, his features weathered by time, and partly hidden beneath a salt and pepper beard that provides texture in terms of his age and weary resignation at being so old. This is a Logan who is continually in pain, the antithesis of the Logan we’re used to seeing, and it’s ironic that the source of his strength and invincibility (until now), his adamantium skeleton and claws, is the very thing that’s now killing him. There’s an inevitable layer of melancholy attached to this, but Mangold and Jackman make sure that Logan’s gruff demeanour is still in place, derailing any sentimentality that might have arisen otherwise. This isn’t as elegiac as its references to Shane (1953) make it sound; instead, it’s about that other staple narrative of the Old West, the passing of an era.

Jackman excels in what is easily his best performance in the role, and it’s good to see him finally playing Logan as something more than the cigar-chomping, Elvis-sideburned figure we’ve been used to. But if Jackman’s transformation into a much older Logan is disarming, then he’s more than matched by Stewart’s interpretation of Xavier’s mental disintegration. There are moments when Stewart’s bewildered, beseeching features are too painful to watch, and again it’s the irony of seeing a once proud and powerful man undermined by the very gift that made him stand out from the crowd that makes the movie so emotionally complex and rewarding. There are terrific supporting turns from Holbrook (give this man a leading role, for Pete’s sake), Grant, and Merchant, but inevitably it’s Keen who draws the viewer’s attention for her largely mute, refreshingly feral performance as Laura/X23, a character with a close connection to Logan, and someone you really don’t want to mess with when she furrows her brow.

If this really is Jackman’s swansong in the role then he couldn’t have picked a better storyline with which to hang up the claws and walk away from the X-Men franchise. By stripping back the narrative, and focusing on the relationships of the three main characters, Logan transcends its comic book origins to become a movie that is daring, quietly introspective when necessary, aggressively violent in a shocking, sometimes disturbing way, and able to take its basic set up – the road movie – and twist it far enough out of shape that it feels more nuanced and transgressive than on first impression. Mangold shapes the world around Logan with a keen eye for detail, and avoids doling out excessive sentimentality, keeping everything grounded and credible, despite the fantastic nature of the material. It’s an artistic triumph, and one that shows that Marvel superhero movies don’t have to follow the same template all the time, a message that Kevin Feige will hopefully take on board.

Rating: 9/10 – an intense, gritty, superbly realised and mature outing for its title character, Logan is perhaps the first “superhero” movie that wouldn’t feel out of place as a Best Film Oscar nominee (though it’s still unlikely to happen); gripping for long stretches, with the quieter moments proving just as engrossing as the action sequences (which are very well staged indeed, if a little hyper-edited), Mangold and Jackman’s determination to give the Wolverine a proper send-off is apparent from start to end.

This year’s Oscars ceremony – that terrible, embarrassing mix-up aside – was a show that stayed true to its usual format, and by doing so, played it distressingly safe. There was a big opening production number courtesy of Justin Timberlake (performing a medley of songs that did at least manage to include his Oscar-nominated song “Can’t Stop This Feeling” from Trolls), and the sight of dozens of unrehearsed movie stars, industry bigwigs, and their plus ones trying to look cool while making it seem as if the only dance manual they’d ever read was called The Dad’s Guide to Hip Displacements on the Dance Floor. You almost expected to hear Timberlake say “Tough crowd!” when he was finished.

Next up we had new host Jimmy Kimmel. His opening monologue took in some expected topics – last years’ #OscarsSoWhite controversy, amusing shout outs to some of the nominees, politics and the Donald, his feud with Matt Damon, and an extended pop at Meryl Streep for being over-rated – and on the whole was a pretty good routine, but it was also a little underwhelming. Even the jokes at Mel Gibson’s expense sounded like they’d been toned down by committee (Scientology? Really? Imagine if the Academy had hired Ricky Gervais this year). And while Kimmel was parlaying his talk show host routine into an Oscars gig, the phrase “safe pair of hands” must have been ricocheting through viewers’ minds across the world.

After so much controversy in 2016, 2017’s approach must have been prudence at all costs. And what could have been the most political and politicised Oscar ceremony ever, didn’t even come close. If tweeting Donald Trump was the best that Kimmel and his writers could come up with, then let’s announce it here: political satire is dead. It took a precise and stinging rebuke by Asghar Farhadi (who wasn’t even there in person) to fully remind people just how insidious Trump’s immigration ban is, and will be if it’s allowed to continue. Even Meryl Streep, who you would have thought would have relished her opportunity as a presenter to say a few choice words about her new President, was unexpectedly muted on the night; it was a far cry from her fiery speech at the Golden Globes.

So with the diversity issue addressed and put to bed, and politics never allowed to stay up past its bedtime anyway, what were we left with? Not a lot as it turned out. Certainly nothing that might have leavened the stale, predictable procession of largely dull presenters – Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson, anyone? – or staved off the overwhelming feeling of déja vu from all the regular platitudes trotted out each year. You know the ones, where each and every category is a unique and vital part of what makes the movies so special. There were the usual musical numbers, used to break up the monotony of award presentation/shots of loser(s) sucking it up for the cameras/semi-humorous quip by Kimmel/award presentation/shots of loser(s) sucking it up for the cameras, and though each was an oasis of merciful relief, they’re still entirely predictable both in their placement and their production (hands up anyone who didn’t think Sting would perform his song solo and picked out by a single spotlight?).

The show lasted three hours and forty-nine minutes, and though that’s a lot shorter than some years (hello, 2002!), it still felt longer. And there’s a curious time dilation that occurs at the Oscars: the last hour flies by in comparison to the rest of the show. It’s almost as if there’s a sudden rush to get things wrapped up for another year. (Though it’s a sure bet they would have liked more time this year: “What do you mean you’ve given Warren Beatty the wrong envelope?”) And as time goes on, the host’s role gets smaller and smaller, until almost every award or presenter is set up by a woman we never get to see, a voice from the Gods who clearly wants to get the job done and move on (like the rest of us).

So. What can the Academy do to pep things up a bit? Well, one way is to make the host more integral to the proceedings and not just a witty mouthpiece to open the show with. (Though it has to be acknowledged that Kimmel’s “hijacking” of a group of tourists was a terrific idea, even if he couldn’t stop himself from patronising some of them.) Whoever takes on the job next year – and it’s unlikely to be Kimmel; the Academy seem to be auditioning for long-term hosts each year, but not finding anyone they like enough – they should introduce every category and presenter, add a joke here or there at everyone’s expense, and generally take every opportunity they can to poke fun at the absurdity of a room full of rich celebrities slapping each other on the back for being so wonderful (unless you’re Denzel Washington, of course).

And for Pete’s sake, someone, somewhere, put a stop to the melancholy musical accompaniment to the In Memoriam section. This year we had Sara Bareilles singing Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides, Now. It’s a great song, and Bareilles has an amazing voice, but as Heath Ledger’s Joker might put it, “Why so serious?” Let’s really celebrate the people we’ve lost. Let’s remind ourselves why we’ll miss them, and do so by showing a montage of them at their best, not by picking out screen moments that aim for poignancy instead. If you look back at all the In Memoriams over the years, count how many comedians have been recognised through a clip or still that would have raised a laugh (good luck with that). (Oh, and they should make sure they get the right picture of someone, as well.)

And if you’re going to get two stars to present an award, then vet them first. Take a leaf out of John Cho and Leslie Mann’s book and make your material shine before you take the stage. Half the time, presenters make you wonder if English is their first language, or if they learn their lines phonetically. On a movie set they can remember pages and pages of dialogue; put them in front of a teleprompter and it’s like they’re all trying to audition for the biopic version of Life, Animated (2016). And whatever else happens, don’t wheel/aid/carry out someone who’s so old/infirm/frail that it looks like elder abuse (was it really necessary to have Katherine Johnson there?).

Lastly, if the Academy wants to do something really bold and different (and keep the running time down), then they should rethink the whole notion of acceptance speeches. While it’s nice to see the elation on the winners’ faces, no one really wants to hear them stutter out the names of people we’ve never heard of, or make the same old pleas for peace, love and understanding (it’s just reinforcing the point made in the previous paragraph). Let them grab their Oscars, wave them about for a few seconds, and then have them ushered them into the wings for their photoshoot.

And there you have it. In fairness, 2017’s show was better than some of the new century’s other outings, but it was still only fitfully entertaining, tied down as it was by its adherence to a production schedule that’s proving to be tired and less and less exciting to sit through each year. To paraphrase Jimmy Kimmel, “Remember that year when it seemed like the Oscars were really entertaining?”

Rating: 5/10 – post-Wernham Hogg, David Brent (Gervais) is now a salesman with dreams of becoming famous by putting together a band, Foregone Conclusion, and going on tour; the gulf between Life on the Road and The Office (2001-03) can be gauged within the first ten minutes as Gervais treats his most enduring (and sympathetic) character with a complete disregard for Brent’s development, and by being unnecessarily cruel to everyone else, making this a chore to sit through, and only slightly more enjoyable than Special Correspondents (2016).

Rating: 7/10 – following a car crash that kills his parents and leaves him lost in the woods, a young boy called Pete is “adopted” and cared for by Elliot, who just happens to be a dragon, a situation that continues until civilisation comes calling in the form of a logging operation; a good-natured remake of the 1977, Pete’s Dragon original offers good performances all round, beautiful New Zealand backdrops, a lovable dragon, and keeps it all light and airy, all of which compensates for a script that wavers too often in its attempts to put Elliot in any real danger from Urban and his men.

Rating: 8/10 – when a new teacher at an all-boys’ school, Mr Traill (Farrar), proves more popular with the pupils, and the school nurse (Gynt), than the older Mr Perrin (Goring), personal and professional jealousies lead to an unexpected tragedy; an adaptation of the novel by Hugh Walpole, Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill expertly creates a hothouse environment for its title characters, but never comes down fully on the side of either, making this a surprisingly jaundiced view of male rivalry, and a movie that features an exemplary performance from Goring.

Rating: 5/10 – two phone pranksters, Sam (Sulkin) and Brady (Clayton), find themselves on the receiving end of a psycho(?) who’s willing to play their own game against them, with increasingly disturbing and violent results; basically the first ten minutes of Scream (1996) stretched to breaking point, Don’t Hang Up will soon have you rooting for the psycho as Sam and Brady behave as stupidly as you might expect, even to the point of continually picking up the phone, or answering their mobiles, just so the story can advance a bit further.

Rating: 7/10 – Mary (Hale), who’s staunchly anti-gambling marries Scott (Young), who does his best to reform, but a trip to Las Vegas – on their honeymoon, no less – soon puts their marriage in jeopardy; a lightweight romantic comedy featuring smooth performances and a pleasing sense of its own absurdity, Lady Luck is carefree, populist piece of entertainment that hits a few dramatic potholes along the way to its final scene, but is nevertheless an enjoyable way to spend ninety-seven minutes.

Rating: 4/10 – the suicide of one of her classmates leads Laura to regret unfriending her on social media, a decision that has dire consequences for her and her friends, as her classmate’s ghost seeks revenge from beyond the grave; in amongst the horror motifs and distressed editing techniques that are now a depressing norm of the genre, Friend Request does have some pertinent things to say about popularity and the perils of social media, but it’s done in such a ham-fisted, unconvincing way that all that effort goes to waste very quickly.

Rating: 7/10 – two couples at an isolated farmhouse share an evening deriding each other’s class and social values, unaware that the sleepwalking tendencies of one of them will lead to blood being spilt; part curdled Abigail’s Party and part baroque thriller, Sleepwalker has much to say about middle class angst, the antagonism inherent in middle class relationships of the time, and sets it all against the backdrop of a social evening from hell.